The solar thermal station the Australian National University built at White Cliffs in 1981 has been added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register, gazetted on 28 August and announced by Heritage NSW on Tuesday.
The listing, SHR item 02127, covers the 14 sun-tracking parabolic dishes at 31 Beth Street, nine water tanks, and a stone wall enclosing the steel shed that still holds the steam engine, the generator, the control systems and the original computers. White Cliffs is an opal town on Barkandji Country, 250 kilometres north-east of Broken Hill and 100 kilometres north of Wilcannia.
Heritage NSW records the site as having "State heritage significance as the earliest commercial solar power station in NSW", and says it "demonstrates a major shift in popular and government attitudes towards energy production and experimentation in the second half of the 20th century". The register entry rates its intactness high and lists it against three criteria: historical significance, technical achievement, and research potential.
“White Cliffs Solar Power Station tells an important story about the ingenuity that helped prove renewable energy could power homes and essential services in remote NSW," Heritage NSW executive director Sam Kidman said. "This remarkable engineering achievement put solar technology into practical use decades before renewable energy became part of everyday life.”
The station was a state government project from the start. In 1979 Premier Neville Wran granted the ANU's Energy Conversion Group $800,000, according to the ANU Press history of the university's solar program, and in July that year the university was formally commissioned by the NSW government to build a solar thermal station with commercial application. Engineers Australia puts the total NSW contribution at $1.9 million. The components were built in a rented industrial building at Fyshwick in Canberra and in ANU workshops, then trucked more than 1,100 kilometres, part of it on unsealed road.
The engineering was improvised in places. Each of the 14 dishes is five metres across, surfaced with more than 2,000 small mirrors cut from silvered windscreen glass and aligned by hand, arranged in two rows of seven. The dishes concentrated sunlight onto absorbers to raise steam, which drove a three-cylinder Lister diesel engine converted to run on steam by Commander Graham Vagg, a retired naval engineer and steam-car enthusiast, because the purpose-built 25 kilowatt engine the team wanted was not commercially available. Output ran through a single-phase 37 kVA alternator, up to 25 kilowatts.
Batteries carried the town overnight. Heritage NSW describes the station as the first use of concentrated sunlight to supply electricity night and day to an entire town by incorporating battery storage. It ran the local hospital, the school, the post office and 12 homes.
It was meant to run for two years. It ran for about 11, until the grid reached White Cliffs in the mid-1990s and the original plant was decommissioned. In 1997 the dishes were resurfaced and converted to photovoltaics by Solar Systems, 16 cells replacing the thermal absorber on each dish, at better than 22 per cent efficiency, with the water circuit switched from raising steam to cooling cells. Heritage NSW notes that after the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target was set in 2001 the station's output could be sold at a premium. It generated 35,412 kilowatt hours in its last full year and shut down in 2005.
How much of a first it was depends on who is asked, and the official answer is narrower than the popular one. Heritage NSW confines its claim to the state. Engineers Australia, which declared the site an engineering heritage place in 2006, goes further on the marker it installed there, calling it arguably the world's first commercial solar power station, on the ground that the electricity was sold to the local community.
Public consultation on the listing closed on 8 May. Heritage NSW says all 34 submissions supported it.
The town it was built for is smaller now than the station was designed to serve. The 2021 Census counted 156 residents, down from 207 in 1986, with a median age of 56 and a median weekly household income of $617. The dishes are maintained by volunteers through the White Cliffs Solar Thermal Power Station Friends, which used a NSW Community Building Partnership grant to build a visitor observation area and a new security fence in 2023.
Listing on the register means changes to the site need Heritage NSW approval. Kidman said the listing recognises the station's history "while supporting its continued use for tourism, education and scientific research".
