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Solar Tower, anyone?

http://www.enviromission.com.au/

I believe California is building one of these in Arizona, and (at least the paperwork part of) another just got started in Texas. At a kilometer in height, one would generate around 250 megawatts.

I like this tech too, really look like it has solid potential!

This was in the works since 2001 so a decade seems about right.

To generate reasonable amounts of power, you need to have a lot of wind.

See: http://www.enviromission.com.au/index.htm

But I like this better.

C) There are people in Australia working on a huge energy tower, several miles high

Sounds like this would be a good fit with the Solar Tower.

But when will it become truly affordable for the masses? That's what most of us want to know. Wake me when it's time to disconnect from the petroleum/nuclear fired grid.

It's already happening in California. This deal is huge. It's between 300 and 900 Megawatts. And what's even more remarkable is that there is no federal or state funding for this project - not even a subsidy or tax break!

The solar electricity is simply profitable. Watch this closely.

Another interesting run is the Solar Tower project in Australia. I'm really excited by this one! Once built, the operating costs drop to near ZERO.

What few people realize is how much the price of electricity varies. So go get your utility bill. Call the nearest solar energy installation guys. You may find that it's profitable RIGHT NOW to put solar cells on your roof!

http://www.enviromission.com.au/project/project.ht m

They recently refigured things and decided the replication and structural engineering in building 4x50MW units would make it more econimical than the originally planned 200MW unit.

If they can ever get off their asses and actually build it, it should be a very interesting project.

Patrick Moore says that wind and solar cannot replace coal because of intermittency problems. This is not correct: electric storage is becoming cheaper and more efficient all the time. Check out Vanadium redox batteries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_batter y In addition the solar tower generates power continuously because of the re-radiation of energy from the ground under the canopy. http://www.enviromission.com.au/faqs/faqs.htm

I keep hoping solar towers will take off, but it looks like these guys might run out of money before they can get their full-scale plant off the ground :-(

Reactors use fuel to heat water to drive steam driven turbine generators right.

How much heat is needed? How many turbines are there? Could we not instead of using uranium, rather
use photos to heat the water from the sun, fed by giant lenses fed by fibre optics, so we could in effect
have lots of collectors 10m wide funnel the light down 1inch fibres all heating the water pipes
which drive the turbines. Sure its only during sunlight, but damn, its 100% free once running. Even during
cloudy days, but not real real dark days. So what surface area do we need to equal a nuke plant? The surface area
of the nukeplant perhaps?

Something like this - http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfacts/sources/re newable/solar.html#Parabolic%20Trough
or http://www.enviromission.com.au/project/video/vide o.htm (build 10 of these babies)
and http://quasiturbine.promci.qc.ca/QTVapeur.html for more info

Solar Tower Project

http://www.enviromission.com.au/

Check out this solar tower project. It uses the sun to heat up air which is under an enclosed canopy. The heated air then rushes up through a gigantic tower, powering generating turbines along the way.

With the current technology, the solar cells required to power a train pulling any sort of useful load would not come close to fitting on the train.

However, around the Adelaide-Darwin railway, there is a lot of desert. If they were to plant solar collectors, and/or a few of those solar chimneys, near the track and feed the electricity generated into overhead power lines or a third rail, they could probably have electric trains running up and down the centre of Australia for free. (Of course, this does not factor in the cost of maintaining 3,000Km of overhead power lines in the desert.)

As power production goes, they simply don't have enough power generation area to produce an output similar to that of existing plants.

That's untrue. It's just that nobody has bothered to scale the designs up before now. The highest capacity solar plants on the drawing board are in the 200 to 850 megawatt range - this is comparable to 1200MW nuclear and 700MW coal plants.

My local (tiny, probably 200MW) coal-fired power plant uses an area of roughly 2km by 2km (not counting space for railroad tracks) - because they require a private lake to provide cool water to the generation process.

The major solar projects that I'm aware of:

(1) Sterling Energy's 500MW facility is going to be built, with the option to increase capacity to 850MW: http://www.stirlingenergy.com/

Their development will use 4000 acres, but that's only a patch of land 4km by 4km (my local international airport uses 10 times the space). It will also work on cloudy days.

(1) EnviroMission's 200MW, 1km tall solar tower. The first full-scale tower is about to be built in Australia and they're scouting for locations to build the first one in the US: http://www.enviromission.com.au/

It's slightly less space efficient than the Stirling design, but it also works at night - the design uses the temperature differential of air between ground level and 1km up. During the day, this is boosted by the sun heating air at ground level.

So, factor in the overhead of otherwise mining and transporting coal and any lakes / cooling reserves that are needed for those systems to work - and these designs are looking very, very competetive.

I think the solar tower that you are looking for is here

http://www.wentworth.nsw.gov.au/solartower/

Going forward to http://www.enviromission.com.au/

They are talking of a 25MW station

http://www.enviromission.com.au/financial/EVM%20CA 188.pdf

and site in the USA ie Arizona

http://www.enviromission.com.au/financial/EVM%20CA 197.pdf

I think the solar tower that you are looking for is here

http://www.wentworth.nsw.gov.au/solartower/

Going forward to http://www.enviromission.com.au/

They are talking of a 25MW station

http://www.enviromission.com.au/financial/EVM%20CA 188.pdf

and site in the USA ie Arizona

http://www.enviromission.com.au/financial/EVM%20CA 197.pdf

I think the solar tower that you are looking for is here

http://www.wentworth.nsw.gov.au/solartower/

Going forward to http://www.enviromission.com.au/

They are talking of a 25MW station

http://www.enviromission.com.au/financial/EVM%20CA 188.pdf

and site in the USA ie Arizona

http://www.enviromission.com.au/financial/EVM%20CA 197.pdf

Sorry, the basic idea's already patented and these guys say they have an exclusive license.

That depends on which part of the post you're reading. One project is solar cars that use solar cells, the other is the solar tower to which you refer. While the parent didn't specify, it certainly seemed to be referring to solar cells -- people regularly complain about the "chemical costs" of solar cells, thinking they're made just like ICs.

On the other hand, since only one solar tower of this type has previously been built (and on a much smaller scale at that), and few people know about it, it seemed very unlikely that the tower was what the parent was referring to. Now ETFE and aluminium have extremely high embodied energy ... I'm not trying to dismiss this project, but people should realise that it's going to be a long way from being "green".

AFAIK the designers have not released enough information for an independent analysis, but they claim an energy payback time of 2.5 years and 900,000 tonnes/year less CO2 release than similarly sized fossil fuel plants. I don't know how long they expect the plant to operate, but that has a major effect on the CO2 reduction calculation.

What you mean, are solar towers.

the other iter members went ahead and cleared the blockade that has been laid since bush reentered iter.

The first post is completely wrong about it being a "threat" to China or anyone else. China *wants* the reactor to be built in the EU instead of Japan. So does the other ITER member, Russia. If the US hadn't opposed the french location and induced Japan to resist it more strongly despite the odds, the project would have went ahead some time ago.

Unlike nuclear fission power, fusion power has enough fuel available that it could potentially supply all of the world's energy demand for thousands and even millions of years and it doesn't produce nearly as much dangerous nuclear waste nor can fusion power be used as a disguise for a nuclear weapons program. The amount of deuterium for fusion is practically unlimited - 1 kg of ordinary water contains about 1 gram of heavy water which contains deuterium instead of common hydrogen. It seems that, unlike in the past decades where the researchers said "Fusion Power will be ready soon, there are just some issues which we expect to have resolved soon if we get more money." it now is "We have the issues resolved and could build a reactor that can sustain a fusion reaction and give a net output of energy. Now we just need the money to build a reactor sufficiently large so we can prove and make sure that it works like we think it does."

Of course with such a pretty-much-as-cheap-as-coal technology available as the solar tower that is so simple in its function, provides steady uninterrupted power, and about which relevant laws of nature are so well understood that it is guaranteed to work, it may be questionable if we actually have a reasonable need for fusion power on earth. Of course, solar towers need a sunny place to build them in order to be efficient and they don't need any high-tech to build either, which may well be the reason why the west has mostly stopped supporting the technology. Solar tower for large scale electricity production can be build with just basic construction materials like mostly cement, steel and glass(which is sand) and with labor. Ideal if you want to help many poor countries, but inadequate if you want them to stay poor and dependent to keep exploiting them.

There are meny more issues to wind power than most people think. There is no such thing as "free" energy, and a wind plant must take its energy from somewhere, namely the lower atmosphere. Modeling large wind farns show that they can have large local climate changeing effects, and we already know that they can desimate local bird and bat populations. Wind power is far from "clean" and serious care must be made in building wind farms. On a more positive note, reaserch into off shore wind farms looks good, and much of the climate impact is tied to the design of the wind farm. Two more promaseing technologies, in my opinion, are fusion, expected to reach economic viability in 2025, and solar, with plants being constructed now. wind farm impact study href="http://www.natwindpower.co.uk/northhoyle/nor thhoyle.pdf">Offshore Wind Farm A Solar Tower Project

Very interesting concept thank you for posting it (hadn't heard about it before).

## Links for the interested ##
The Australian company involved: http://www.enviromission.com.au/index1.htm
The designers/inventors Schlaich Bergermann and Partner: http://www.sbp.de/en/fla/index.html
(choose Projects | Solar Energy | All Solar-Power Plants, first and last pictures take you to the two solar tower projects)
A recent Wired news item on the subject: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,54917, 00.html

Please mod parent up as interesting :)

I have similar concerns about a Enviromission's proposal to build a giant chimney in New South Wales, Australia. What effects will a constant steam of hot air rising into the atmosphere have on local weather patterns?? Articles on the proposal can be found here, here, and here.

The Solar Mission Project (http://www.enviromission.com.au/project/project.h tm)(http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2002/08/21/aus_power _020821) will use sunlight to heat air and convert the kinetic energy of the rising air to electricity.

I believe I can top that.

Have a look at the future of solar power. ;)

The Aussie plan site says "Construction of the world's largest solar-powered electric generating plant could begin on Tapio Station as soon as January 2003." That's six months ago, so I clicked the link to EnviroMission, the company behind the project. The "News" section was not very useful, but I did find a January 2003 announcement that they were trying to round up another $250k (assumably, that's A$) for the project. Not a good sign.

As far as the arguments that this tower -- or any other large-scale solar alternative -- is "simpler"... that's an apples-to-oranges comparison. The sun-tracking mirrors may be simpler to build and maintain than a 1000-meter-tall (that's 3000+ feet for we US types) chimney!

Making molten salt the receiver of the solar energy -- the medium that converts light to transportable heat -- is pretty cool. But they could conceivably put a turbine on top of the heat exchanger and do the same thing as the Aussie project, just several thousand feet shorter.

The "molten salt" has the advantage of being method of energy storage. This is a problem for both wind and solar generation systems -- while traditional plants (even nuke plants) can throttle back their production of electrons by burning less fuel, solar and wind have to have someplace to "put" the excess energy if it's not immediately needed.

There are other ways to store energy, though... one idea I've read about (can't find a link!) is to use excess electricity to pump water into high tanks, then let the water flow back into low tanks when demand increases. But that's not nearly as cool as pumping melted salt.

The Aussie plan site says "Construction of the world's largest solar-powered electric generating plant could begin on Tapio Station as soon as January 2003." That's six months ago, so I clicked the link to EnviroMission, the company behind the project. The "News" section was not very useful, but I did find a January 2003 announcement that they were trying to round up another $250k (assumably, that's A$) for the project. Not a good sign.

As far as the arguments that this tower -- or any other large-scale solar alternative -- is "simpler"... that's an apples-to-oranges comparison. The sun-tracking mirrors may be simpler to build and maintain than a 1000-meter-tall (that's 3000+ feet for we US types) chimney!

Making molten salt the receiver of the solar energy -- the medium that converts light to transportable heat -- is pretty cool. But they could conceivably put a turbine on top of the heat exchanger and do the same thing as the Aussie project, just several thousand feet shorter.

The "molten salt" has the advantage of being method of energy storage. This is a problem for both wind and solar generation systems -- while traditional plants (even nuke plants) can throttle back their production of electrons by burning less fuel, solar and wind have to have someplace to "put" the excess energy if it's not immediately needed.

There are other ways to store energy, though... one idea I've read about (can't find a link!) is to use excess electricity to pump water into high tanks, then let the water flow back into low tanks when demand increases. But that's not nearly as cool as pumping melted salt.

You can heat things with the sun too, like air and water. This one uses air: http://www.enviromission.com.au/

Yah, it's tall, it's been tested, and it's pretty simple. It's made out of almost all glass, concrete, and some steel. Stick these puppies out in the desert where nobody is anyway. Like in Australia and the southwestern US (*cough* california power problems).

Yes, you're going to have some problems with cloudy days, so accept that there are going to be some days when you're not going to get much power out. So make sure you use the extra electric on good days to make lots of hydrogen. That way we can move a source of energy around the country to places that may have trouble with this type of power (new england for example). You could also fire up some fuel cells to make electric out of said stored up hydrogen when the days are nasty.

So umm... why not?

EnviroMission's site has more information regarding the technology employed, as well as some nice flash animations.

Considering Australia's size and geography, I'm surprise solar power isn't implemented on a wider scale. If only the polititians would get their heads out of their arse, they would realize solar and wind power are the only intelligent, long-term choice. They may bitch about the price, but once these things get to be built in large quantities the price will go down accordingly.

/max