On Wednesday 6th December, it was announced that Proactive Energy Developments Limited and the University of Newcastle have been jointly successful in round three of the federal REDI Grant scheme, being awarded $1,224,250. 

Their project is to develop “a simple-to-use, flexible and robust heat regenerator...that will enable supercritical power

cycles to be implemented in geothermal power generation.” For those of you (like me) who are not engineers, Assoc. Prof. Behdad Moghtaderi of UoN supplied me with the following: “Supercritical power cycles have...superior technical and economic characteristics over...flash, binary, and combined power cycles. The lack of acceptance...of supercritical power cycles is primarily due to...the lack of a suitable heat regenerator capable of dealing with the peculiar behaviour of working fluids in the so-called supercritical region. [This project] is an attempt to resolve this shortcoming.” 

In summary, they aim to improve the efficiency of geothermal power generation by 40%! The project is expected to be completed by the end of 2008.