New Techonolgy: Solar Thermal. This isn't Your Grandma's Solar Energy!

What's the point when we have plenty of coal? Coal is cheaper.

The only way a single one of these plants is built is with government subsidies. Time to end them.

 

1) They don't appear to be installed ON any houses.
2) All homes emit toxic gas/smoke if burned. Ever heard of carbon monoxide?

The Republican fear of knowledge is disturbing.

 

Coal will run out.

 

According to the Economist the Brits are trying to build a fusion reactor, first one attempted since like the 1950s... no nuclear waste.

 

Only idiots believe CO2 is a pollutant.

 

Really? Where are the home solar panels installed if not on the roofs?

 

As supplies dwindle, prices will rise until alternatives are competitive. Let the market sort it out.

Top down command economies suck. The government does a terrible job of picking technological winners and losers. To all the lefties in this thread, stop being such statists and go sit in the corner.

Although I do like that this thread is surfacing while the FBI raid Solyndra. Was that intentional or unintentional? Ah, of course it was unintentional sadly.

 

"Professor"

I'm going to assume you didn't watch either video and you just started typing negative remarks due to partisan hackery.

Both videos show large scale installations on the ground.

 

It's sad to see people fighting about energy sources. That is just what they want people to do in order to maintain the status quo. IOW....huge central power plants with a monster-size inefficient grid. Even if billions are spent to make it a 'smart' grid, it's still inefficient.

The crime is that we are being told that all we can do is to stay with coal and nuclear while we wait for 'clean' technologies. Well, some technologies are here already. The problem is that Big Energy doesn't want them to get a foothold. Almost all new technologies being pursued will be local, on-site energy production that will render huge power stations obsolete.

Here's a couple I like.

http://www.bloomenergy.com/

http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/n.../21/nuclear-hot-tub-reactors-25-million-each/

The only reason there is a lib/con divide on this issue is due to propaganda from both parties fed to them by Big Energy lobbyists. They want a huge investment in their infrastructure in order to commit us to their business model right at the time when alternate technologies are proving viable. It is huge to them to lock us in now.

There's nothing conservative about locking us in to a monopoly right when it seems we have a choice. Let's not make energy a political football. It's a game where we will all be losers. Instead, let's level the playing field so science and the free market can drive our energy policy. There's plenty of market incentive in being an energy producer if govt would quit favoring the status quo.

 

Actually, the lib/con divide has to do with choosing the most cost effective energy vs chasing windmills quixotically.

 

See... looking at this thing didn't make sense... moving the mirrors was the first thing that came to mind. Why not just do this backwards, get rid of "solar panels" all together and make long black trapezoidal black boxes with a large magnifying lens as a cover, which makes a solid, highly focused beam hitting a big black aluminum pipe filled with this magic liquid?

Ever put an ant under a magnifying glass? Would be cheap as (*)(*)(*)(*), and you could make a 100 diopter prismatic anamorphic lens which focused light from sun up to sun down without any moving parts.

I guess that would be too cheap and easy. I wonder if I should be a sellout and apply for some patents and government grants. Who cares if it really works... right?

 

My central point is that we aren't being given choices except what?....coal and nuclear. Well, hydro electric but that has been maxed out, I think.

Of course, what I say doesn't make much sense if there really aren't viable alternatives available. The Bloom Box, though not yet for home use, is clean, proven, sustainable and cheaper than conventional power. The Nuclear Hot Tub is not as far along. The technology isn't new, but I don't think there are any in the field yet. Cost estimates put the hot tub in line with conventional energy.

Here's a link to the home page of the company developing the hot tub.

http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/about.html

...and a link to a page showing some customers of the Bloom Box.

http://www.bloomenergy.com/customers/

 

Check out this company: http://www.changingworldtech.com/index.asp

 

Did you even read the thing or did you just decide to post BS when you saw this threads title?
Seriously, these arn`t even home solar panels, they are basically meant to be a part of power plants.

 

Radiation, cool! Sign me up.

Not.

Now, how on earth would the people of Southern California supply power closer to home. Think... Hmm.. "Sizzling" millions of acres of sunbaked wastelands in the eastern counties like Imperial. San Diego sun drenched 9/10ths of the year.. Hmm...

What what what could they do?

Such a stumper...

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3lWzZGEmbE"]AREVA's Kimberlina Solar Thermal Power Plant - YouTube[/ame]

 

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3lWzZGEmbE"]AREVA's Kimberlina Solar Thermal Power Plant - YouTube[/ame]

About Ausra's Kimberlina demostration plant in Bakersfield, CA. The most impressive thing is how quickly these facilities can be put up. We could have these things peppered throughout the sunbaked wastelands of the Southwest and West. They use much less land than traditional Photovoltaics. The only voltage produced with this type of "solar" energy is through the steam produced.

Now bear that in mind as you see here how deadly nuclear energy, that can lay waste to vast regions of the earth upon one minor accident, produces energy: same as solar thermal [fresnel] steam!



You could set up enough solar fresnel/steam plants to equal the MW output of one nuclear facility in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost of just getting the permits for one nuclear power plant. And the bonus is that if something goes wrong, entire sections of the globe don't have to evacuate for tens of thousands of square miles forever.

Personally I prefer the solar-steam way of generating energy.

 

must be nice to live in a place where the sun shines 24 hours a day

 

You don't need to live there. Only generate power there. Have you seen a map of the landmass availible to produce solar steam in the Southwest? There's an acre or zillion there to set up these systems. And that's not even counting the geothermal steam potential there. If you must locate a solar steam plant further north or east, hybridize it with nightime/cloudy natural gas or coal as a fraction of the generation. Or simply use molten-salt heat storage [battery] tanks.

And this doesn't happen from solar steam:



Note: these pictures are real and existed on a website for Chenobyl's children before the nuclear industry forced them to be taken down in order for that outfit to continue to receive funding to care for the affected population of diseased kids in the Baltic region around Chernobyl's crippled plant. It's still leaking deadly radiation to this day and will essentially forever. Plutonium's half-life is 24,000 years +.

People don't have to live where their power is generated BTW. They can live very far away.

 

The space programme was once un-proven. So was all compueter tech -America lead the way with all this.

I find myself constantly askingmyself, "where has that American "can-do" attitude gone?".

 

It's not safer than the technology in the OP.

 

If we waited until carbon fuels ran out, we'd be back to the dark ages. Well, you would. Europe and China would be well ahead by then. The US military would be waiting on the next US tech boom to fuel its planes and tanks, leaving it very vulnerable.

 

but it supplies power 24 and 7 rain or shine, something that wind and solar cannot. The most advanced molten salt tech in the world only supplies power about 7.5 hours after the sun stops co operating and even where you have zone 1 solar insolation that still leaves 10.5 hours a day on average with no power. In winter that could go up to 12 - 13 hours without power, and that is just a average. Go a week or two continuously with no power and see how you like it.

 

As noted none of this is new technology and a Fesnel lens does not create some form of super-energy source. Fresnel lens have been around since the early 19th Century and they merely focus light similiar to a magnifying glass or a parabolic mirror.

In the 1970's I was the project engineer for a solar energy company that dealt with thermal solar energy collection and virtually everything I needed to know was in a book from the Smithsonian Institute published in 1906. We selected parabolic collectors over Fresnel lens for cost reasons but the principles are identical. The both concentrate the energy of light from the sun to create heat.

Here is the catch.

There is only about 420 BTU's of energy per square foot of sunlight at 93 million miles from the sun (the average distance from the sun to Earth) in outer space. That's all there is. Some of this energy is lost as light passes through the atmosphere and the distance it travels through the atmosphere detemines how much energy is lost. At sunrise, for example, sun light travels through many times the amount of atmosphere than it does at high noon. Clouds, as note, also reduce the energy as they absorb it. Some energy can be collected even with heavy clouds but not very much. Typcially there are about six hours of prime energy collection from solar energy with it being less outside of that time frame as the sun light must travel through more of the atmosphere.

The most energy that we collected during "prime time" was about 370 BTU's/sq ft in S. California but another factor comes into play. As the intensty (temperature) of the energy collected increase there is a corresponding loss of energy. When we managed to achieve 370 BTU's of energy in heating water from 69F to 70F but when we were collecting energy at 300F we only captured about half of that amount of energy.

Finally the higher the pressure of the boiler the more efficient the "steam" turbine is. Pressure is related to the boiling point of the medium being used. Water boils at 212F at sea level but to obtain high pressure most steam turbines run in the thousands of degrees. Low pressure turbines exist but they are only fractionally as efficient as high pressure turbines. Typcially low pressure turbines use something other than water to attain higher pressures at lower temperatures. In the 1970's we used freon but that's been banned and today we'd probably use RU134 which has a low boiling point. The problem is that RU134 is very expensive when compared to water.

Basically we have physics working against us when we attempt to produce cost effective electrical generation from thermal solar energy. We need high temperatures which lose much of the energy and require a lot of land because we don't have a lot of energy to begin with. We also have a problem with just keeping the collectors, whether they are Fresnel lens or reflective consentrators, have to be cleaned. Dirt and dust also reduce efficiency just like clouds. When addressing hundreds or thousands of acres of collectors/reflectors this either requires mechanical cleaning systems which are costly and prone to breakdown or manual cleaning which is even more expensive.

The best use of solar thermal energy is low intensity (temperature) applications. Water heating for the home where temperatures are about 120F-140F was relatively cost effective while heating a swimming pool where we're addressing 80F temperatures was the most efficient and cost effective use.

 

still waiting on the sewage to hit the rotating air recirculation device on this, if it does not turn out to be a elaborate scam life and energy as we know will suddenly change

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Andrea_A._Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Generator

lots of other rumors and articles out there on it

http://energycatalyzer3.com/news/rumor-nasa-testing-rossi’s-e-cat

if this turns out to be more than a pile of BS I will have to forgo my claim that the first cold fusion was achieved in W Va when my cousin took a drink of shine while chewing tobacco

 

This can be cost-effective in Algeria and South Arabia, but not in Canada or UK. Also in Arizona but not Maine.

Ludwik Kowalski (see Wikipedia)
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