Mixing Coal and Solar To Produce Cheaper Energy

Al writes "It might not please many environmentalists, but a major energy company is adding solar-thermal power to a coal plant and says this could be the cost-effective way to produce energy while lowering CO2 emissions. Abengoa Solar and Xcel Energy, Colorado's largest electrical utility, have begun modifying the coal plant, which is based near Grand Junction, Colorado. Under the design, parabolic troughs will be used to preheat water that will be fed into the coal plant's boilers, where coal is burned to turn the water into steam. Cost savings comes from using existing turbines and generators and from operating at higher efficiencies, since the turbines and generators in solar-thermal plants are normally optimized to run at the lower temperatures generated by parabolic mirrors."

Comments

Re:who would object?

[Jurily]

sounds good to me, donno any environmentalists who would object to burning less coal.

As long as you don't want them to give up their car, they're fine.

Preheat

[AP31R0N]

Kids, you can't pre$VERB. Pre- is for events. But let's pretend that you can. Preheat would mean before heat... what the summary describes is HEATING the water. When you put water in a pot and place that pot on a stove, and turn on the element to boil the water... you are heating the water. There's no need to add pre-. When you walked to the store yesterday, you didn't postwalk to the store... you walked. If you plan to walk to the store, you are not going to prewalk... you're just gonna walk.

Would you say "I'm going to pre-open this door so I can walk through it"? No, you'd leave off the pre-. Even if you open the door five years before you plan to go through it, you'd just be opening. Nothing magical about it. Adding pre- contributes nothing. It's just ignorance and pretension. Commonly used/accepted != right.

Don't add pre- to things just to make it sound more technical.

Pre- is for delineating what happened before the event. Every day before 9/11 would be pre-9/11. The steps you take before you heat the oven would be preheating. Once you turn on the oven, it is heating. You are now in the era of the oven heating.

|*turn on oven*|*oven is hot*

Preheating would be everything to the left of *turn on the oven*.

So instead of "preheat the oven to treefitty". It should be "set the oven to treefitty. While the oven is heating, do steps B, C and D".

Hit reply to post some lame excuse about "language's change over time get use 2 it at, LoL". i won't read it. Use your karma to "bury" my comment if it makes you feel better about being ignorant. i'm OK with that. OR - Learn what words actually mean and how they should be used (and not).

Re:who would object?

[commodore64_love]

Do you even know what you're talking about? Alpha particles are weak. Even if you swallowed uranium, the alpha particles couldn't pass through the cell walls to cause any damage to the DNA. You can play with alpha particles all day long and not even so much as a skin rash.

Perhaps if you had been talking about beta or gamma particles, then your post would have been "informative" but as it stands now it's just... to quote Penn & Teller... "bullshit"

Also: Don't coal plants have mandatory filters to remove all the soot from their exhaust? Yes. What comes-out is basically just water vapor - they are cleaner than your home's personal natural-gas heater (which foolishly has no filtering).