Kira Rundel leads commercial and strategic projects at RayGen, a Melbourne-based next-generation solar and storage company, supporting the development and deployment of grid-scale renewable energy projects in Australia and globally. Prior to joining RayGen, Kira worked as a consultant at Bain & Company. Kira obtained a bachelor’s degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Arizona in 2015 and a PhD in MSE from Monash University in 2019 for her research in next-generation organic solar cells.
RayGen combines hi-tech solar with thermal storage for proven, reliable and flexible energy. Our innovations – across solar and storage hardware, operating software, manufacturing and process optimisation – offer a new capability for the fight against climate change. RayGen’s Carwarp power plant is the world’s largest next-generation, long duration energy storage (LDES) project, the world’s highest efficiency solar photovoltaic project, and is contracted to one of Australia’s largest utilities, AGL Energy. RayGen has a growing, GW-scale pipeline of utility solar-plus-long-duration energy storage projects in development globally, with an initial strategic focus on the Australian grid, including a project with AGL at the former Liddell coal power station. RayGen is also investigating baseload power supply to Chevron, Equinor and SLB operations. The presentation will describe RayGen's new technology - how it works (in detail), key differences, applications - and also discuss this world-leading 50MWh project, with many photos from site. An outlook for future projects in development will also be provided.