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Thermal Solar Plant To Be Erected In Australia
connect4 writes: "An article from the bulletin explaining a plan to erect a 1km high solar convection wind turbine in outback Victoria - the worlds tallest construction. Projected output per tower: 200MW. Cost to build: A$670m. Footprint of tower: 20sq km
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This sounds very impressive. It's great to hear that there is still plenty of active development in seeking out new power-sources. The tower sounds absolutely incredible:
If it's built it will surely be a wonder of the modern world - I'd certainly love to see it! A prime example of the better elements of what mankind is capable of...
Also there is always an environmental issue, even in solar power it is common for there to be MORE damage to the environment at first - in this case they expect to have countered that, and be "in the black" environmentally after only 2 1/2 years!
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
It's like saying "why have hydro-electric generators at the bottom of a long fall of water.
Projected output per tower: 200MW. Cost to build: A$670m. Footprint of tower: 20sq km. Look on the face of Trolls when they see "erect" in a /. headline: Priceless.
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Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
It's not much more expensive than an ordinary coal-plant when you take the effects of the waste of such plants, the cost of the coals and the costs to keep such a thing running in consideration. You'd also not want to scale it up but rather build a few more... never rely on a single source of power.
0x or or snor perron?!
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
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/scotland/new si d_1699000/1699665.stm/
says that wind energy in Scotland with the help of wave and tidal resources could provide 60GW / 75% of the UK's energy requirements.
slashnik
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Maintenance costs? I mean, you don't just whack a great big building in the middle of nowhere and expect it to just work for the rest of its life, do you?
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Expected life span? If it only is good for ten years, it's a bloody expensive way to generate electricity.
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Effect on the surrounding area? A one kilometer tower is going to cast a pretty damn big shadow.
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Expected average output? 200 MW peak output is what the article says... that's not the same as 200 MW average.
Don't get me wrong -- I reckon it's a rather neat idea. But the article doesn't give the whole story by any means.$670 million australian isn't that much money.
Currently its $348 million US, which is about the TOC of a nuclear reactor of the same capacity
Throw in credits from carbon trading, valuable research into the technology, bragging rights and the ability
to wean australia's fossil fuel dependant economy off foreign oil (australia is the world's worst polluter per captia) this is a very very good deal. Go Aussie!
This stuff could be VERY useful in near-tropical regions. like India for example, the temperature difference (in the more extreme parts ~25N) goes from 40deg C (in the daytime) to something like 10-15 at night. So this could also possibly be used to churn out far more power than the aussie counterpart, IF used correctly. This is specifically for regions that have a high temperature during day/night times, and a nice dry climate. Coastal regions wouldnt be of so much use for the simple reason that the temp. gradient obtained is not so large.
US is now divided as the "Red" and "blue" states. Red States = communist countries. Coincidence? I think not
I think we've lost our nerve for risk, an affliction in which we are probably not alone.
Could you use the large "greenhouse" below to grow something that would not normally be sustainable? I guess it would take a small amount of the energy out, but it might be worth it.
If not, at least plant a forest, so that you have more heat capacity to work with over night when the sun is down.
Why? Because all these enviromental generating schemes do is prevent the building of NEW fossil
fuel stations. What never happens is the replacement of a fossil fuel power station with
a renewable energy one. We need to reduce our overall power consumption. How many of you leave
your PC switched on for no reason other than you can't be bothered to wait 1 min for it to boot
when you want to use it again in 3 hours time?
UNtil peoples free for all attitude to energy consumption changes all we'll be doing is buying
ourselves a little bit more time but the end result of massive climate change will still occur.
Building more nuclear plants would help but the liberal right-on lobby would have a apoplectic fit
if anyone suggested that because in their not-too-bright minds they do a simplistic link between nuclear power and nuclear war so hence its verbotten.
Actually it wouldn't - here's why:
1) While the towers would look quite impressive, I doubt there would be many people actually working on the site at any given moment.
2) To terrorize people, you have to give them the impression, that you can kill them at your own convinience.
Blowing up at 1 km tower and killing three people won't do that. Sending two planes into two towers where roughly 50.000 people work WILL terrorize people.
You can rebuild a 1 km. tower, but you can't rebuild the sense of security lost, when someone blows up a work place of 50.000 people and kills 4.000 people in the process.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
The quote by an energy industry manager, "It won't work", is typical of the process:
Usually, that is the end of things for revolutionary technologies... I hope it won't be in this case.
-- H. Wilker
So, 200MWatts(peak)/$670M AU = $3.35/Watt.
Converting that to USD, I get $1.72US per Watt of generating capacity.
Of course, that's the *peak* figure, and the article didn't say much about what the expected *average* power would be.
Anyhow, add to that the benefit of a 1Km platform for an antenna platform, plus the tourist draw of an observation deck, and it sure sounds like a winner to me.
Now, if they would just start building these all over the Mojave...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Just for those who didn't read the text:
They had a similar thing in Spain (150 km south of Madrid) between 1982 and 1989. It had had some funding problems and for that reason was built on the cheap. As a consequence it collapsed in 1989 in a storm. It had a capacity of 50KW.
The idea is that:
- you have a big greenhouse that collects the sun and generates hot air.
- you send that air into a very high chimney because the air at a high altitude is colder so you can get more energy
- closed water basins in the greenhouses store the heat for the night so that you can generate electricity at night too
The biggest problem seems to me that the technology has not been tested very much. Scaling from 50KW to 200MW is quite a big step. And the quoted prices seem to have a lot of variation depending on the article that you read.
This is a really nice project. But it only makes sense if it is combined with agriculture or other forms of solar power generation.
The carnot efficiency is defined as e=(T1-T0)/T1. If we assume T1=20C=293K, T0=0C=273K, the maximum thermodynamic efficiency is 20/293=0.068=7%. And this is the theoretical maximum. So it would be more reasonable to expect something like 4% for the total efficiency.
On the plus side, this design comes with built-in energy storage for the night, it can be used for agriculture, and it might be possible to increase its efficiency by placing photovoltaic cells in the collector area.
If you consider that this thing will be a huge tourist attraction, building it will definitely be worth it.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
Reminds me of This article I read a while ago.
-- My hovercraft is full of eels.
It would be easier to build a machine that collects and processes the sweat of the nervous investors on this project...
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Let me give you the lowdown
Has anyone looked at the possible effects this would have on local weather patterns?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The article says nothing about the possible impact this will have on rain patterns in the area.
I've read that airliner jet streams appear to change weather patterns in the US, but jet streams seem minor compaired to 20 square kilometers worth of heat creating a permanent cloud in one location.
Won't this draw humidity that would otherwise fall in other nearby areas?
Australia hasn't caught on to energey effecent houses. Double glazed windows are installed for noise, not keeping the heat in. Most houses (every one more than 10 yrs old I've been in) have large vents that were required when heating was done with wood buring fires. Now they just let the heat out in the winter and heat in durring the summer. In the US you can find R30 insulation because its required by law for new homes. In Australia you would be hard pressed to find anything better than R5. If the goverment had any clue about how to help provide incentive, many of these wasteful houses could be fixed but the tax advanatges are only for people buying brand new houses or home owners that want to buy properly. There is nothing like the home loan deduction like in the US and propery values in Melbourne and Sydney aren't that bad compared to London or Palo Alto even though the average wage is about 1/4 of those places. At least you can still buy dorm sized places in the city for just about US$150k. I wonder if they will have energy saving windows...
I would be highly skeptical of a project like this. It has a huge initial price tag, even if EVERYTHING goes according to plan. What if it doesn't go according to plan? With it so high up, maintenance costs could be extraordinary if anything went wrong. This is a zero emissions plant, but it won't actually have lower emissions than a comparable fossil fuel powerplant until TWO AND A HALF YEARS later because of all the CO2 emissions created during construction?!?!? What would the lifetime of this project be?
Spending a sizable fraction of a billion dollars to reduce co2 emissions by what appears to be an inconsequential amount doesn't appear to me to be a brilliant idea. Maybe it has some value as a test example, but if so, WHY does it have to be that big and cost near half a billion dollars.
I'm not an Australian taxpayer, so I don't care if you go ahead and do it, but if I were, I would be highly skeptical...
The state of Victoria needs about 7600MW of power. The proposed convection tower's *peak* output is 200MW. For comparison, the two gas power stations I have data on (I work for an energy company here in the UK) are 600MW and 850MW. It seems like the tower is playing in the right ballpark, although it really is completely dependent on its mean output, not its peak.
BTW, the gas power stations produce power extremely close to their capacity, 24 hours a day. Power is expensive to store, so you really try and avoid overproduction. If the tower's output varies wildly over a 24-hour period, or even seasonally, this will be a disadvantage.
Still, it's a pretty damn cool idea - a zero emissions power station with no requirements for supply lines, *and* it's already been prototyped in Manzanares. I wonder if a *smaller* tower might be a better idea (cheaper, less of an eyesore), using the principles of micropower to build a robust, distributed network of smaller-scale power stations, rather than fewer, giant power stations.
Damn, distributed network? This is sounding like the internet power grid...
In order to make any sense at all, electricity has to be generated for less than 5 cents per kilowatt hour. (Your electric co charges 10-15 cents per kWH, and the difference is the cost of getting it to you.) At a construction cost of $670 M, the interest alone (at 10% per year, in the ballpark for a risky project like this) comes to $7,667 per hour. At 200 MW, and assuming no downtime and 100% of rated capacity (neither of which is likely), that comes to 3.8 cents per kWH, JUST FOR INTEREST ALONE! Add in any sort of operating costs, and it just doesn't look all that feasible to me.
A typical steam generated unit in Australia generates only 350MW. Power stations obviously have a few of these, each with their own boiler, turbine and half of a cooling tower.
It may be cheaper to build a few of these solar units than one enormous thing that can pump out 1GW.
Those people were idiots. Solar cells are generally around 12% efficent. On a bright clear day you can expect about 1000 watts per square meter to hit the cell, at 12% efficency that's 120 watts.
7 km^2 is 7000000 m^2.
Multiply that by 120 watts and you get 840 megawatts, or about as much power as an average gas plant.
Of course that doesn't even begin to go into the transmission losses...
I read the internet for the articles.
One of the big objections was to the eyesore of a 1 km tower. Also it would seem a lot of expense and risk is associated with such a tall tower.
So does it have to be vertical?
Just find a nice mountain that is snow covered year round and that lives next to a desert. (Death Valley anyone?). Build an insulated chimney from the base of the mountain to the top, following the terrain. Having it lay on the ground will make it a heck of a lot cheaper, easier to maintain, it won't fall over, and it won't be an such an eyesore.
Also a 20km base is a lot of real estate. A green house is very good from a reliability and fuels stand point. But, could you use other heat sources? How about rotting compost or geothermal?
This system would do well in Iceland. Plenty of hot springs and plenty of mountains
Why build a permanent tower?
I've been thinking about this for a while-- for both power generation and city-wide air conditioning-- (though there are obvious dangers and complications.
Use a cloth tunnel that is raised by dirigibles as the chimney. Install the generators at the base.
The cloth chimney would presumably be cheaper-- although obviously less durable. But it would open the possiblilit for chimneys miles long.
I've also though that a kite at the end of the chimney (buffetted by the chimney's exhaust) could suppport the entire structure.
A light transparent, IR opaque chimney could increase the heat inside the chimney itself-- regardless of the area theat it draws from.
What is the advantage of having the generators off the ground? As long as the air flows through does it make a difference?
Another alternative would be ground based tunnels.
Erect an arched greenhouse-- and make it several hundred kilometers long-- run it up the side of a mountain. Instantly, LA could have cool ocean breezes, no temperature inversions and the American West would receive more rainfall (and smog).
But then-- what would happen to the rest of the world?
Please read up on umbra and penumbra. Suffice it to say a basketball WILL NOT make a shadow larger then itself (if that). Hell even the moon casts only a shadow the size of itself during an eclipse. The direct sunlight will be affected but because of the size of the sun there is a heck of a lot of light that comes in "from the side".
'Education and religion are two things not regulated by supply and demand. The less of either the people have, the less they want.
- [Charlotte Observer, 1897]'
South Africans are always quick to point out that not everything revolves around the Aussies.
See for example this 1998 article.
"...Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Also, you all may recall the recent news that British Nuclear Fuels has liabilities of 48,000,000,000 pounds sterling (I think you still come close to doubling that for US dollars). After more than thirty years of operation of nuclear power in the UK the debts are astronomical and still growing.
In the US, of course, the plants can break even by selling weapons materials at a cost calculated to keep them breaking even, which is why you only see nuclear power in countries that have nuclear weapons or aspire to do so.
As for safe and clean, ask someone in the Ukrane about that! Also remember that the grossest mistakes of Russian engineering have been mirrored in the past by corner cutting US entrepenuers (Three Mile Island).
Just replace the heat-sinks on all those overclocked Athlons with 100m PVC pipe towers, mini-turbines, and voila!
Yes, that's a joke. Although... large server farms... hmmm... Or build it over a busy highway intersection? Is automobile exhaust hot enough to be useful? I know cities are noticably warm than the countryside around them (asphalt, mostly, but all those heated buildings do matter a bit...)
According to the article, by messing with the relative temperature and humidity at ground level and at high altitude, you can create a pressure system that isn't conducive to hurricanes, which would tend to essentially push an incoming hurricane off to the side. Build a line of these along a hurricane-prone coast, the author said, and they'd pay for themselves within a decade just from the cost savings of not having to rebuild after a couple major storms.
I was pretty skeptical, but what little I remember about the principles behind the idea sounds almost identical to what today's article describes, so maybe it wasn't as kooky as it sounded.
Did anyone else read the same Analog article? Please post if you know which issue it was in -- I'd love to go reread it, since I've forgotten most of the technical details at this point.
/.
Don't lock down your mind so tight - the problem is to capture "250 kilowatt hours in a fraction of a second" not to "come up with a battery that can".
Such a device might resemble a capacitor more than a battery, I'd guess.... or maybe you could convert the bolt to heat and store it in a thermal mass (like a couple of tonnes of stone, perhaps) to be converted to electricity at leisure.
You don't need 100% efficiency when the incoming energy doesn't cost anything. And you don't need to predict where it'll strike - it's pretty easy to build an attractor.
--Charlie
This is actually one of the best idea's ive heard in a while. I mean, sure, all the energy combined from the treadmills, bikes and rowing machines at a large sized gym would probably only be enough power to power up the computer at the front desk of that gym, but hell, how cool would that be?
Don't Tread on Me
/. .vs. protection for a more detailed description of the technology.
Well, lighting and windmills is pretty much a solved problem... Lighting is not 100% predictable, though, so there are occasional weirdnesses that should be planned for.
Owners of large towers have found that you can prevent lighting from occurring by burying three cables radiating outwards to the height of the tower, then installing large metal "dissapators" at a couple of points on the sides. Take look at lightning prevention
There's also a lot of discussion of this sort of thing on the "Towertalk" list if you're interested; for example this post.
--Charlie
Nice idea, but it'd be too heavy for dirigibles to lift, I'm sure.
Let's say the tower is 100m in diameter and the cloth weighs 25g / square metre, which is pretty optimistic, I'd say...
that's 2*pi*50 (radius) * 1000 (height) * 0.025..
7853 metric tons.
A cubic meter of hydrogen will lift about 970grams at sea level.
That's pretty heavy.
so (ignoring the height of the tube), that's 8095876 cubic metres of hydrogen required to lift the thing.
That would need a sphere roughly 250m in diameter to hold it up.
Okay, so maybe that's just about possible, but that's only a very optimistic guess.... I've not counted for the fact that the dirigible is going to need to be able to lift itself, that you'd need a hydrogen/helium mix to stop it being dangerous, that the tunnel might be twice as wide, that the cloth might be heavier, and of course that the cloth would be much heavier once it has been rained on...
Assumptions:
$670 million in construction costs
no maintanence charges
life of loan is 20 years
life of plant is 20 years
construction is instentanious (no time paying interest with out plant online)
monthly interest payments at 10% (0.0083% per month
No down time and all power used as produced
For 200MW average power output
Total cost incluing interest $1,770,546,502.78
Total output over 20 years 35040000000kW
Cost per kW $0.05
For 100MW average power output
Total cost incluing interest $1,770,546,502.78
Total output over 20 years 17520000000kW
Cost per kW $0.10
This could turn out to be more expensive to produce the energy than traditional sources, but the pollution credits could change thet. Also some one pointed out that this would take two and a half years to get it pollution credits in the black because of what is released during construction. Well I would like to say that building any other type of power plant will produce its own share of construction related pollution.
What I do not understand is this. By green house do they mean glass building filled with plants, or do they mean glass building filled with empty space over dirt. Plants would absorb energy (as they will be turning the sunlight into food) and less energy would be put into the air that needs to be heated. Also wouldn't it be better to build in condensors along the inside of the chimney as "dry" air weighs less (so it moves faster), has a lower latent heat energy (has a greater change in temperature with the same amount of heat), and condensing water gives off heat (the activation energy needed to vaporize water in the first place).
Friendly
The reason you might be concerned is weather. Large generating plants operate at much higher effeciency but can still affect the local weather significantly. This would affect the local weather several times as much per kilowatt-hour.
It may be that this plant would be too small or Australia is too big to worry about the weather right now. However, one should remember that no method of generating power is without its environmental effects.
I am also skeptical about this greenhouse. It seems to me that you would need an awfully big greenhouse to provide substantial benefit while you're using it to heat air constantly, and it's going to take energy to maintain it. Ever make a greenhouse in high school? It warms up slowly, even when it is sealed.
Depends on how you are getting power to heat the sand into glass. For the second one of these you build, you can use the power output from the first one to generate the heat, and burn no coal.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Have you got anything to say or are you just going to insult anyone who doesn't instantly agree with you regardless of your lack of proof? If you have a problem with nuclear waste but think fossil fuels are just dandy, kindly explain to us why putting it underground, far below the water table is somehow worse than burning coal and letting everyone share in the joyful experience of breathing in the smog.
But then again, you might be right; Georgia Tech does indeed have a nuclear power plant, and while it was never running during my time there, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Nuclear and Radiological engineering department got rid of any nasty materials by giving it to the dining halls...
Dyolf Knip
Here is a link to the designers of the original plant in Spain. Under "Index - Solar Power Plants" you will find more on both the Solar Chimney and a Dish/Stirling combination.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Go back and read what I wrote again. I said nothing at all about price per KwH, I only calculated the construction cost per Watt of generating capacity.
If you're going to rant, please be so kind as to address what I actually did say. You might also note, that I did not say anything disparaging about this idea. I'm very much in favor of it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Wouldn't the tendency to rise be almost exactly balanced by the weight of the column of air above? Otherwise the atmosphere ought to be less stable than it is ordinarily.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
I mean, sure, all the energy combined from the treadmills, bikes and rowing machines at a large sized gym would probably only be enough power to power up the computer at the front desk of that gym
Sure, this post got mod'ed up for it's humor, but what you propose is far more feasible than you may imagine. Do the math. Even during light exercise like pedaling a stationary bike, the body uses around 200-300 kCal/hour. That's about 230-350 watts, albeit most of that is just waste body heat and metabolic processes. Still, it would be quite reasonable to capture somewhere in the range of 50-100 watts from a bike using a generator instead of friction resistance. Given proper design, a gym could get ALL of its electrical needs from exercise machines, which would very quickly pay for the cost of the generators, storage batteries, and regulators. Yes folks. Intelligent green design just plain makes sense. Now this crazy solar tower may be a different story. (-:
I was simply replying back to his sarcastic giberish with yet more sarcastic giberish. If you you want to have a serious discussion I am amenable. Check my profile, I have some experience in the field.
And by the way, Georgia Tech's Neely Reactor facility is not a power plant. It's a 5MW research reactor. 5MW isn't nearly enough to do any real power production. Check for yourself.
And as for your comment about waste going to dining halls, is that an attempt at humor regarding the poor quality of food there? You must understand any facility has to have a license from the NRC to handle, store and dispose of radioactive material. Disposal to a dining facility (or a schoolyard) isn't going to happen.
"Don't always get dumped in the proper place" Do you have data to support this? If not it's just more FUD.
And putting toxic waste into a hole (a deep hole) is indeed a good solution, if you have made reasonable attemps to reduce the volume and toxicity, if you use some common sense about the disposal site, and if you make every effort to limit access.
The people you so easily demonize about waste disposal also have children and grandchildren. Why would you think they care less about their own descendents than you care about yours?
You (and you are not alone by any means) make statements that have the implicit underlying assumption that people who make these decisions or design disposal containers or systems, haven't done any research or homework, they've simply "flipped a coin" to decide. I assure you this is not the case. It is HARD to get a LLRW disposal site licenced in this country. The reason is not science, it's FUD and NIMBY and political manuevering.
Also, did you ever think that maybe future generations might find a valuable use for this waste? We may not have the technology to make use of it, but I think our descendents may.
Nothing you ever say will convince me that dumping toxic waste in a hole is a good solution. Or that the people who dump it have never made a mistake or shortcut which has affected peoples' health.
Another anti-nuke with an open mind.
Whatever. I've wasted enough time and bandwidth on this.
I think you need to get outside more
you might have heard of a thing called weather?
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Well, my rational was, the reactor generates power, ergo, it is a power plant. It may not be used as such, or even at all, but there it is.
Tell me something, have you ever eaten from Brittain dining hall at GaTech? If you had, you would be the first in line to agree with my speculations as to the source of the food. Getting kicked off campus after my first year (up yours, Housing!) and having to cook for myself was probably the healthiest thing I will ever do.
Dyolf Knip