00:02Mirrored dishes in the outback. The legacy of what's believed to be a world first commercial solar power plant.
00:09Steam into the piston, pushes the piston down. At the bottom there's exhaust ports like a two-stroke.
00:16The plant provided power to the remote town of Whitecliffs, three hours northeast of Broken Hill.
00:22It started as an experiment in 1981, built by a team from Australian National University to research solar thermal power.
00:32Engineers Australia described it as equal to the Snowy Mountains scheme or the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
00:39It's nowhere near as big but it's of that sort of importance.
00:43The dishes captured the sun's rays to make superheated steam which drove an alternator and a DC generator.
00:50In a land of heat and sun, Whitecliffs was the perfect place to prove the technology.
00:57They went and put weather stations all around the state and they found that Whitecliffs had the most daily average
01:03sunlight hours than anywhere else in New South Wales.
01:07The station was mothballed in 2005. The old dishes now heritage listed.
01:12Whitecliffs is a small opal mining town with a population of 150 people.
01:19But with the plant's inclusion on the state heritage list, locals are hoping it will draw in more tourists.
01:26State heritage register items tell the stories of New South Wales.
01:31That's a big drawcard for people to come into regional areas.
01:35It's just remarkable we know we've got the talent and the skill in this country to create something like this.
01:40Preserving the history of solar energy for generations to come.
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