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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."
... one 7km environmental dead zone at a time.
Well built solar panels can last quite a bit longer than 7 years. Many consumer grade solar panels have 10 year warranties, and many of the older panels made 40 years ago are still in operation.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
The Australian system is simply a greenhouse that powers turbines, no solar cells at all.
Given low reserves of oil, relatively remote location, first world technology, and lots of sunshine, Australia seems a country with big incentives and resources to develop solar power.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
For some reason they didn't build them back then. I wonder if the patent was part of the reason. Maybe your dad's patent is a wonderful example of why the current intellectual property rights laws don't really help much with innovation.
Either way, kudos to him! I hope his name gets mentioned lots whenever there is a press release about these machines. Some how i doubt it though.
It was a University of Toronto student who was involved in the unfortunate accident.
Yes, there are some safety concerns with the solar cars, but the biggest safety concern stems from the simple law of physics - conservation of momentum - the solar cars are just not heavy enough. However, the same safety concerns apply also to any motorcycles on the road, or the those Smart cars.
Solar cars already travel in a convoy consisting of a lead and chase vehicle with amber warning lights. With extensive driver training, good route planning, and some common sense, I think they can be safely raced.
there have been some very cheap processes recently for doing cells. These are cheap, clean to manufactuer, and supposedly have ~30 % efficiency. Right now, they are doing studies to make sure that cell does not break down quickly.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Archimedes supposedly set fire to the Roman Navy using an arrangement of mirrors.
And you probably wouldn't want to have this guy as a neighbour, as he used reflected light from 100 mirrors to "cut" the tops off several trees.
The manufacturers seem to like to hold warranty info close to the vest, but the numbers I've been seeing lately are 25 years.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
many many months now, and i have scanned it thoroughly for construction dates, and its closer to 2~3 years until the design is even finalised, so 1 year sounds pretty optimistic to me. "worlds largest solar tower"? its will also be the worlds first non-prototype solar tower, 1km tall. i'll be travelling down there from Sydney to monitor its progress. -5 Troll modifier, well at least i got my opinion out :P
Hot air rises - and it also expands, adding to the effect. It's too bad this type of generator cannot be incorporated into existing structures but on a smaller scale - i.e. office buildings, blacktop streets to heat air, etc.
Leon O. Billig, in a fact article in _Analog_ titled "Defeating the son of Andrew" (11 years ago this month), proposed convection towers on the order of ten times as tall. I recommend this article to everyone as a mind-stretching exercise.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
These solar towers sound pretty cheap to me. At $2.5-$3.75/watt, they're far cheaper than solar pannels which go for about $8/watt. And, nuclear has had subsidies out of the wazoo. Nobody's subsidizing this thing at all (this is mentioned in the Wired article).
"But," you say, "the energy is free..."
But it's not. Just because the incoming energy is free, it's not free to capture and convert it to electricity. There's a maintenance expense to account for. Remember, this tower is huge, the collector is even bigger. Cracks will form and have to be sealed. On a tower that big, that's a job for a large crew that will never end. They'll no sooner get to the top than it's time to start over and do it again.
A windstorm comes through and blows out panels, they've got to be replaced. Sandstorm blasts through scratchs the clear panels, reduces their efficiency - got to replace em. Hailstorm comes through, fractures lots of panels and causes them to leak which reduces collecting efficiency. Got to trim the weeds under the collector so they don't play havoc with the airstreams. I could keep going but I think you get the point...maintenance is going to be a bitch on something that big and it's not free. I don't know what the numbers are but the installation in Spain wasn't self sustaining which doesn't make me confident that simply scaling the sucker is going to make the costs drop enough. I get even less confident when the website starts talking about needing government subsidies.
It just doesn't seem like heating up a bunch of air and blasting it out the top of a 1km high tower can be good for the atmosphere...
Wouldn't this possibly cause some some kind of weather effect?