With Ausra Acquisition, Will Areva Compete for Europe's Big Desert Solar Project?

A few months after first saying that it was considering three bidders for its business, solar thermal company Ausra has announced the winner: Areva, the giant French engineering firm best known for its nuclear power plants.

Ausra holds a notable place in the cleantech industry. It was among the first companies to re-popularize solar thermal, in which mirrors focus sunlight to boil water, which in turn drive turbines to generate electricity. Solar thermal is generally considered much cheaper than solar panels, but it usually has to be built on a massive scale.

Hence Ausra's problems. As a startup, it didn't have enough money to actually build what it had conceptualized. So after initially saying that it would abandoned the idea of developing its own projects to produce steam for industrial uses (food processing was one example), it apparently began looking for buyers. (Update: An Areva rep wrote to clarify that Ausra also stayed in the electrical generation market as an equipment provider.)

There's no reliable information yet on how much Areva paid for Ausra, or what it intends to do with the company. But there are parallels to look at. Last October, the German conglomerate Siemens announced a $418 million acquisition of Solel, an Israeli rival to Ausra (which was itself started in Australia).

The purchase of Solel had an obvious motivation: Siemens is heavily involved in Europe's Desertec solar project, which plans to build a huge transmission network between Europe and northern Africa with the aim of sourcing 15 percent of the northern continent's power from African sunlight. If Desertec never happens, Solel will be useful to Siemens; if the project does go forward, the startup will be indispensable.

As for Areva, the company initially got French prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy to speak out against Desertec, because it could disrupt plans to build Areva's nuclear plants in Morroco.

But ultimately, Areva is an engineering firm that can pull off other sorts of infrastructure projects. In the event Desertec goes forward, Areva could now be a credible bidder; and with Ausra's technology in hand, it could conceivably flip its support toward Desertec, with the expectation that Sarkozy will once more come through to help with the deal.

For now, Ausra has its steam-generating business. That might be more lucrative than it sounds; just last week I wrote about GlassPoint, a startup that hired away one of Ausra's co-founders to work on its own solar thermal tech, aimed at the drywall and oil recovery businesses. Or Areva could be planning to dive back into the electricity market; time, and the Desertec verdict, will tell.