The sun could be rising on Florida's alternative-energy future as a company with Palm Beach ties turns up the heat on an unprecedented commitment to develop solar power in the Sunshine State.

"Has Solar Power's Day Dawned in Florida?" was the rhetorical theme during the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County's quarterly luncheon Tuesday in Delray Beach.

The organization invited keynote speaker John O'Donnell, executive vice president of solar-thermal energy developer Ausra Inc., to answer the question. His answer: Technologies of the past were limited, but new methods will make solar power a winning proposition.

"We didn't have technology that was cheap enough, that could be put in hurricane country," said O'Donnell, who grew up in Palm Beach and attended the Palm Beach Day School. "(Now) this is totally doable. A tidal wave for solar is at hand."

The program took place two months after the Clinton Global Initiative in Manhattan, where former President Bill Clinton announced that Florida Power & Light Co. would invest $1.5 billion over seven years to develop solar-energy plants, about $900 million of it for a new Florida plant using Ausra technology.

Australian scientist David Mills, chairman of Ausra, created the core technology: the Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector. Unlike photovoltaic panels, Mills' field of mirrors track the sun and focus its heat on water-filled tubes; the resulting steam drives electricity-generating turbines.

The results are reliable, zero-carbon electricity at a market price of about 10 cents a kilowatt hour, O'Donnell said.

FPL will build a 10-megawatt test plant at an existing energy production site in Florida within a year, O'Donnell said. Central Florida east of Tampa has a climatic edge because coastal areas have more cloud cover.

If the test plant meets regulatory requirements and the cost and technical benchmarks, FPL will expand the plant to produce 300 megawatts. Ausra said that can power about 45,000 average homes, while reducing the carbon footprint by an estimated 11 million tons of emissions over 20 years.

The land needed for solar development is minimal, and former citrus groves are plentiful, O'Donnell said.

Ausra formed last year after he learned of Mills' work at the University of Sydney. The Australian and his key people relocated to Palo Alto, Calif.

Ausra has drawn more than $40 million from two venture capitalists: Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems; and Ray Lane, former president of Oracle Corp. and a managing partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

O'Donnell gave luncheon attendees homework, urging them to express their opinions on solar development to U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Florida. The industry's top legislative priority is an eight-year extension of the solar-energy investment tax credit beyond 2008. They say a long-term extension will save consumers $500 million and replace 1,000 jobs exported from Florida.

O'Donnell grew up in Palm Beach and attended the Palm Beach Day School, as did his sister, business executive Carey O'Donnell. Their mother, Patricia Carey Morse, the widow of Palm Beacher Granville Morse, lived on the island for more than 30 years.

John O'Donnell studied at Yale and worked for the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory. He holds several patents, and has founded and run technology companies in supercomputers, digital imaging and video processing.

In a talk last summer on the potential for Big Solar at the Western Governors Conference, O'Donnell referred to his early work in nuclear fusion.

"Now I work with a nuclear fusion reactor that is 93 million miles away," O'Donnell said in describing solar technology that has advanced far enough "that we can just focus on the financing."

He called the deal with FPL "the world's largest single solar power project ever announced," twice the size of the one Ausra and Pacific Gas & Electric will build in Southern California.

The timing is right, O'Donnell said, because "the technology and the market and the political will are aligned."

"FPL is doing something very bold," O'Donnell said.

FPL Energy began investing in the future of Big Solar about 20 years ago, O'Donnell said. The utility already owns the world's largest solar thermal fields, in California's Mojave Desert.

FPL CEO Lewis Hay has said such ventures are good business.

"We think that we can make money making these kind of investments," he said.

After evaluating Ausra's solar-thermal capabilities, FPL views "this breakthrough technology as a promising option to make solar energy an economically sound addition."

Solar also has the advantage of not being an imported business, because no one controls sunlight, O'Donnell said.

"And we can fix the climate, as a side effect," he said.