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Dubai Is Building a Refrigerated Beach
dataxtream writes "The world's first refrigerated beach is to be built at a luxury hotel in Dubai, located along the southern coast of the Persian Gulf. The beach will include heat-absorbing pipes under the sand along with large wind blowers, which will keep tourists cool and guard their feet against the hot sand. Half of me says these guys need a reality check, the other half wants to go there." I believe I've just thought of a way we could solve this whole global warming thing I've been hearing about.
What they are proposing is just to extract the solar thermal energy from the beach sand. The solar energy doesn't have to be wasted. If they were to take the solar heat laden coolant, and pass it through a heat exchanger, and into a Stirling engine, they could use it to generate electricity to power desalination equipment, for example. Using the cooler ocean water as the heat sink wouldn't produce very high efficiency, but it would still be a net gain. It wouldn't cost very much more than just throwing the heat away. They could get coolor sand, and generate solar power at the same time. Just a thought...