Heliostat South Australia has signed a memorandum of understanding with Indian energy major Global Wind Power to manufacture and develop solar products on the sub-continent.

While most of the work will be carried out in India in order to meet Indian employment targets, managers and engineers will operate out of South Australia.

Heliostat executive chairman Darrin Spinks said the project could grow quickly from 150 jobs initially, to as many as 1000 workers building up to 120,000 Heliostat reflectors over four years.

India is developing solar power projects up to one gigawatt per project as it ramps up its renewable portfolio.

Heliostat’s Concentrated Solar Power system uses efficient dual axis mirrors to precisely and automatically track the position of the sun, allowing greater energy output per square metre, overcoming one of the key issues with solar power: the amount of space it requires.

Sunlight is focused on a solar receiver tower which superheats water or air to drive turbines to produce power at a higher thermal efficiency.

Heat is stored overnight and produces power for up to 12 hours without sunlight using our advanced energy storage technology.

The technology was developed with the CSIRO.

Test fields have been in operation for over a decade, and the company says it has the only heliostat capable of supercritical steam output.

It says whereas conventional solar photo voltaic cells are limited to 25% efficiency its Heliostat CSPV cells convert 40% of energy into power, and will soon be at the 50% mark.

“This is possible because Heliostat SA has developed new PV technology that absorbs a far greater wavelength spectrum of solar energy than conventional silicon systems,” the company says.

Ultimately, CSPV solutions require less land, are cheaper to set up, and produce far higher power output, the company said.

The CSIRO predicts that by 2050 CSP technology is expected to account for up to 25% of the world's energy needs.

Global Wind Power is a JV between Reliance ADA Group and China Ming Yang Wind Power Group and so far has limited itself to developing wind turbines.

Heliostat has also signed a memorandum of understanding with another Indian company, Gravita, to develop industrial CSP thermal application for metal recycling.

India’s push for renewable energy for its population comes as the former secretary for the Indian power ministry, Eas Sarma joins the chorus of voices warning Australia against developing the Galilee Basin coal mines, including Adani’s huge Carmichael coal mine, which has week suffered a setback with the Federal Court overturning of Adani’s development approval.

The claim by Prime Minister Tony Abbott that more coal will lift 100 million out of energy poverty here reveals a lack of understanding for the situation in India and in other countries where large populations remain without access to electricity, Eas Sarma said.

India's population of 1.24 billion comprises 247 million households, 68% of whom live in rural villages, and around 45% of rural households and 8% of urban households lack electricity.

Those figures have not changed appreciably since 2001, though around 95,000 MW of new largely coal-based electricity generation capacity was added during the intervening decade.

“In the rural areas, many remote villages are beyond the reach of the electricity grid,” Sarma said.

“There are also many families in electrified villages who cannot pay for expensive electricity.

“Studies have shown that when a village is more than 5km from the grid, the cost of supplying electricity from solar and other off-grid solutions is far below the costs of supplying from conventional sources such as coal.

"This is due to the high cost of building out the poles and wires to provide access to coal electricity and the technical losses involved in transmitting and distributing electricity to the consumers.”

“In the urban areas, in addition to affordability, the constraints on the poor accessing coal power include the absence of firm ownership rights to the houses in which the families reside and the unsafe condition of the houses itself.”

The Indian electricity supply system is presently skewed heavily in favour of coal-based power which cannot meet the peak-time demands and any further addition to coal power will only increase the overall cost of electricity, without addressing the peak-time shortages.

“To address energy poverty and energy security, India's focus must be on encouraging locally generated and indigenous renewable energy systems and moving towards decentralised electricity generation based on renewables,” he said.

“Even if 1% of the country's land area were to be used to harness the abundantly available solar insolation at an efficiency of 10%, the country could generate 570 times India’s current electricity demand.”