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 ."

Comments

Re:Why the height?

[waimate]

It needs the height because there is a 1 C temperature differential for every 100m of altitude, so 1000m = 10 C, which is what creates the 'draw' and makes the whole thing go.

It's like saying "why have hydro-electric generators at the bottom of a long fall of water.

Um... what about...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some questions that need to be considered:

• 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?
• Expected life span? If it only is good for ten years, it's a bloody expensive way to generate electricity.
• Effect on the surrounding area? A one kilometer tower is going to cast a pretty damn big shadow.
• 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.

Pretty useful in near-tropical regions

[hashinclude]

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.

Re:More info

[Goonie]

This is why not:

1. The Liberal and National parties, which currently form a coalition federal government, receive much of their funding from mining companies.
2. The Labor Party, which is the major opposition party and controls most of the state governments around the nation right now, is an offshoot of the union movement. Guess in which industries the union movement is strong, and thus which unions exert considerable clout in the ALP? Yep, that's right, mining and electricity.

Re:Is this the time for renwable energy

[Richard Kirk]

The solar chimney is a really neat idea for reasons that do not transfer to wind power.

All the moving bits are at the bottom (well - within 40M of the bottom). This means that you can get to service them without having to scale the chimney. You can swap out the generators for more efficient ones when they are developed without having to redesign the rest of the scheme.

There are windmill designs (the Savonius rotor) that have the generator at the bottom, and don't need pointing into the wind, but these are a design compromise between efficieny and servicability. The wind farms in Scotland have a dynamo with a windmill on top of a big stick. I remember the 'Tomorrows World' presenter going up it, and going rather green: the really big ones are pretty scary places to work.

The chimney can also generate power when it is half-built. It won't be as efficient, but this may allow the building loan to be spread out. Once you have built the chimney, it may then make finiancial sense to expand the greenhouse area. A windmill is either there or it isn't.

Don't get me wrong - I like windmills, and a solar chimney in the Orkneys simply isn't on. However, the Orkneys windmill is paying because regular electricity was over 4 times the cost on the mainland. However, IMHO, the solar chimney is in a different league to windmills and tidal stations. I do hope it gets built.

Better idea

[glowingspleen]

It would be easier to build a machine that collects and processes the sweat of the nervous investors on this project...

Re:Lets put this into perspective..

[Grond]

whanau said:
"Currently its $348 million US, which is about the TOC of a nuclear reactor of the same capacity."

US$348 million will buy you a nuclear plant in the 1.5 Gigawatt range. It would cost about $300 million to build a new reactor comparable to the one about 5 miles from my house (Arkansas Nuclear One) which produces a total of 1694MW. Nuclear power is far, far cheaper than solar, wind, hydroelectric, you name it. Now, whether it's better is somewhat open to debate, but it is by far the most efficient way to produce really large amounts of electricity, both in terms of cost and in terms of space (the cooling tower on Unit 2 is big, but it ain't 1km big).