Mr Michael Rae

Mr Michael Rae is a computer scientist who joined CSIRO in 2006 after working in the commercial IT industry, initially working in the modelling and sampling of industrial atmospheric pollutants primarily from power stations, roadways, and mines. He moved into the simulation of energy and grid systems before moving into solar thermal research.

After moving into solar thermal research in 2009 he has worked across various physical domain computing environments including process control, microelectronics, instrumentation and system modelling. Since then he has contributed to most of CSIRO’s pilot scale solar thermal projects including design, construct, and operation of high temperature experimental plant. These plant have included SolarGas, Supercritical Steam, Supercritical CO2, Air Turbines, Thermal Energy Storage, and Falling Particle systems.

His work in heliostats is primarily in the electronic, software control, and metrology areas having worked on the development of CSIRO’s microelectronics package, firmware, tracking analysis, calibration, and machine vision systems both across the hardware and software domains.

He is currently the leader of CSIRO’s Solar Thermal Optics team comprising of engineers and scientists across the computing, mechanical, and mechatronics domain.

Michael has recently directed some of his and the team's capability from solar thermal engineering applications into the photovoltaic field which the launch of the Ultra Low Cost Solar initative. Aiming to support cost reductions in utility scale PV with a goal of $15MWh by 2030. The ULCS program aims to support the Australian PV industry develop technologies between the cell chemistry and grid connection.