Solar Power Put to Good Use

Current Shunts writes "Teams from all over the U.S. and Canada will be competing this summer over a 2,500 mile course from Austin, Texas in the United States to Calgary Alberta Canada for the 2005 North American Solar Challenge. The purpose of this event is to promote renewable energy technologies, integrate science and engineering disciplines, and give competitors an opportunity to showcase their technical and creative abilities." At the same time, zestyalbino writes "Construction on the world's largest solar tower [RMIT] may begin next year in Mildura, Australia. In a nutshell, "An ever present large mass of air under an expansive transparent collector (seven kilometres in diameter) is heated by solar radiation (greenhouse effect) providing a continuous flow of hot air to drive electricity generating turbines located around the base of the one-kilometre tall central tower." There's also an article on Wired."

Comments

Yes

[pyth]

Let's just ignore the chemical costs of making solar collectors.

Re:Yes

[nyekulturniy]

As long as the cost of the energy obtained is higher than the cost of the chemicals, go for it. Besides, the Australian system looks as if it is more reflectors.

Re:Yes

[Phanatic1a]

Oh, it's better than that.

So far, the main impediment to building the tower has been the cost, with estimates ranging from $500 million to $750 million. Davey won't say how much the project will ultimately cost but said the company is considering two new engineering innovations that will reduce construction costs and improve efficiency.

Let's assume they don't hit any overruns and go with their minimum estimate of a half billion dollars. That's for 200 megawatts of generation capacity.

That breaks down to 125 acres and $2.5 million dollars per megawatt.

You can build a Westinghouse AP1000 advanced light water reactor at around $1400 per kilowatt, assuming you build 2 at a site. That includes design, engineering, and licensing for the first two plants. Cost for 200 megawatts would be only 280 million, and would take up far far less than 25,000 acres. GE's advanced boiling water reactors, which are already cranking out megawatts in Japan, could be build in the US for $1300/kilowatt, again assuming two per site.

Nobody builds nuclear reactors that small, of course, so those estimates are really for plants of about 1500 megawatts capacity.

The expenditures for this solar tower are *still* way out of line, even assuming their best-case estimates are correct.

Re:Yes

[ErikZ]

Yeah, but all you have to do is build a big greenhouse and put a wind turbine in it. Great for countries with low tech and some useless land.

Re:Yes

[ArbitraryConstant]

While your arugments are true, nothing like this has ever been built before. I think the next biggest solar tower was a little 20 kW thing. This is a prototype. However much it costs, it's safe to assume they will get cheaper in the future.

Re:Yes

[SidV]

"How much did the comparable (IE: first) nuclear power plant cost per megawatt?"

"That breaks down to 125 acres and $2.5 million dollars per megawatt."

60MW for 72.5 million dollars or about 1.25 million dollars per megawat in 1954-7 in Shippingport PA.

Re:Yes

[SidV]

I don't know. the 1 Billion (with a "B") + square feet of plastic, and the metal framework to support it, might have something to do with it.

Are we going to run out of oil?

[nmoog]

There seems to be more and more articles of this nature on slashdot these days. Search for "peak oil" and today and you'll get twice as many results as yesterday.

Are we in a bit of a state of emergency, or is just something to fill in the news until the next war/economic crisis/natural disaster?

(p.s. I'm not taking any chances. I'm learning the important survival skillz)

solar car challenge

[Zapraki]

"The purpose of this event is to promote renewable energy technologies, integrate science and engineering disciplines, and give competitors an opportunity to showcase their technical and creative abilities."

What? I thought the purpose of this event was for the various Engg departments at all the competing schools to have a general good time, fostered by healthy rivalry and no doubt a few unspeakable antics along the way! That is why we have these competitions isn't it? I mean, who really cares about solar power? Especially in Calgary, the Fossil Fuel Capital of Canada.

Hold on, before you mod this post (+5: flamebait) let me continue.

I'm in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Calgary, and although I'm not actually on the Solar Car Team (yet... they're recruiting like mad), they did steal our study room to use for their club room. So it's almost like I'm a part of it... sort of. In fact, there's a whole bunch of leftover crap from their wooden prototype crowding the hallways here right now.

But ya, all joking aside, I think it's a really cool challenge and we here at the UofC look forward to competing alongside other great academic institutions. (And having a good time besides! I tell you, if UofC wins this thing, there's gonna be a party in Calgary the likes of which we haven't seen since our precious Flames almost won the Stanley Cup....)

Ok, now feel free to mod this (+5: flamebait) for shamelessly bringing up the NHL.. or lack thereof (sigh)

Re:Solar power cars may be unsafe on highways

[jay-be-em]

Near where I live there are dozens of fatalities per year involving gas guzzling vehicles. They may be unsafe on highways!

The article you reference shows it was a loose brake line; how is this specific to solar technology?

-1 troll.

Don't underestimate the power of competition...

[pflodo]

People perform and achieve so much more if you give them a challenge. These races are the breeding grounds for new technology that can eventually find its way into future cars.

What I would like to see is an electric Formula 1 type competition, I would bet that it would only be a few years before we would have electric cars with performance and range to match current Formula 1 cars. With developments in electric motors and battery technology that can then flow on into domestic cars, just like disc brakes, seat belts, crumple zones, fuel injection, and the list goes on...

price of solar chimny and solar panels

[grqb]

I'm surpised that the solar chimny is actually cheaper than solar panels. Basic calculations show that the solar chimny costs between $2.5-3.75/watt but solar panels cost about $8/watt. I would have expected the solar chimny to be much more expensive, considering that it's going to be twice the height of the tallest structure today (the CN Tower in Toronto).

One cool thing about the solar chimny though is that apparently it can generate power 24hrs/day, unlike wind that fluctuates. Basically the solar chimny generates electricity from the same type of turbine that a wind turbines use.

Promote technologies?

[ctr2sprt]

I remember when I was younger first hearing about these races and getting excited. It sounded very high-tech and neat, and plus it was a car race - who doesn't like car races? I was, naturally, very disappointed when I learned how slow these things go. My parents explained to me that they couldn't go faster because they didn't have enough energy to do so. At that point I just thought, "Then why are we wasting time on this?"

So I'm not sure these guys are really promoting anything. I strongly suspect their races are having the exact opposite effect, in fact: convincing people that solar technology is nowhere near ready for prime-time. Instead of showcasing stuff solar tech can do that nothing else can, they're showcasing the stuff it does really, really poorly.

As an academic project, I think this is great. I'd love to be involved in it and I'm sure I'd learn a lot just from following it closely. But as PR? Not even close.

These challenges are useless.

[Insanity]

Every year we're subjected to media coverage of a number of these solar-powered races, and with each one, it gets less and less interesting.

It's not a big surprise that you can take thousands of dollars worth of carbon fiber and build an extremely light and impractically fragile vehicle with a design lifespan of a few dozen hours. No real science is being done in these races, just incremental advancements in the application of computational fluid dynamics and power control circuitry. Reduce the drag coefficient by 0.5% over last year's design, cut the weight by two kilograms... it's a complete waste of time.

This will *NEVER* result in a practical vehicle, for the simple reason that the theoretical maximum power you can get out of solar cells is on the order of 1000W/m^2. These solar races are not baby steps toward a future in which we'll all be driving solar cars, they are just a dicksizing event between university engineering departments.

Even as such, they're a waste - there are far more impressive things upon which a group of talented young engineers could focus their efforts.

Re:These challenges are useless.

[alienw]

It's not very useful as an everyday car. However, it's a fine example of engineering at its best. That's exactly what, mechanical and electrical engineers are trained to do. A Formula 1 car is not practical for everyday driving, either. But it is an example of advanced engineering. I think you do not exactly understand what engineering is all about.

Re:Solar power cars may be unsafe on highways

[Anonymous Coward]

It also mentions about possibly banning solar cars from the highway... I think that since the solar cars are not built with the same safety standards and are MUCH lighter than gas cars, in any accident case, the solar car doesn't stand a chance.

Since the gas-powered cars are the ones responsible for inflicting the damage, maybe they should be the subject of any banning campaigns.

At any rate, I haven't seen anybody proposing banning motorcycles, which also don't have much in the way of safety features.

Re:Repricing at Kwh

[grqb]

Sure, there are other costs...but everything has other costs. Can you put a price on the fact that coal spits out 100 times the amount of radioactive material into the air than a similar sized nuclear plant? How do you even clean that up? Also, everything in the energy sector is subsidized. No nuclear power station has EVER broken even in North America...but still our energy bills are cheap...why? Because our energy is subsidized. Maybe you don't need a subsidy to build a coal power plant, but your tax dollars sure do go to paying for environmental damages, health damages and other things associated with the coal power plant.

Good maths...

[Farmer Tim]

...but you're only looking at the inital costs, not total cost of operation. A nuclear reactor is far more expensive to run and maintain, contains more moving and pressurized parts requiring higher standards of engineering expertise, reactors produce nuclear waste which is expensive to transport and store (and the waste from the tiny, 45 year old research reactor we have in Sydney is politically volatile enough, thank you), and at the end of the working life there's still the problem of decommissioning with the associated clean-up and disposal costs.

By comparison, this takes a lot of land (but considering Australia is a largely arid continent with a population not much more than 20 million mostly living on the coastal fringe, appropriate land isn't hard to come by), but requires relatively little maintenance, no expensive and hazardous fuel, little to no full-time supervision, and can be repaired by glaziers rather than expensive nuclear technicians; an entire installation could be run by a staff you could count on one hand. It also wouldn't require the same degree of security, which is another saving.

Oh, and $1,300 per kW = $1.3 million per MW...slightly more than 50% of what this tower is projected to cost (hardly WAY out of line, nice try at slewing the figures though), so with the overall savings in operational and maintenance costs over an average lifespan of (conservatively) 30 years, the solar tower *still* comes out in front.

Offtopic - not silicon cells

[dbIII]

But you do have a point, the chemical cost for photovoltaics right now is very high.I cannot understand how anyone on the net can keep pointing this out - the process to purify silicon for the wafers that make CPUs is the same as that for the silicon solar cells - and other techniques have been developed over the past twenty years that allow us to use multicrystalline silicon and other materials. Industrial processes have a cost, and in the case of the silicon cells that people rant about it is a large energy cost and not a "chemical cost" - the stuff is made out of silicon dioxide guys - it's not like extracting gold or copper.

Anyway, the topic is about solar thermal, which can only boil you rice or purify your water on a small scale but gives you megawatts on a large scale. Solar cells don't scale at all, the best you can do is buy another one and get an additive effect - but they have been the darling of governments and energy companies that want to look green because they don't require planning. The place for solar cells is somewhere that is not on the grid - in the trivial example you don't need to plug your pocket calculator into the wall and in the non-trivial example you can set up a marine navigation beacon and not have to change the batteries for years.