Slashdot Mirror
Google Getting Into the Solar Mirror Business
adeelarshad82 writes with this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector, but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by [25%] or more. The company's engineers have been focused on solar thermal technology, in which the sun's energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam to turn a turbine. Mirrors focus the sun's rays on the heated substance. ... Google hopes to have a viable technology to show internally in a couple of months, Bill Weihl said. It will need to do accelerated testing to show the impact of decades of wear on the new mirrors in desert conditions."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd vote for them. They (corporate entity) seem to have a better head for good governance and forward thinking than any politician I've had the 'pleasure' of running in my province.
I guess they figured out thier electric bills were too high.
Is it just me that's annoyed that in most power plants we actually still use glorified steam engines ?
I know that it's the best way we currently have to convert heat (which is the only type of energy we manage to recover) into electricity, but it still feels kludgy. I hope we'll figure out something else eventually.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
" It will need to do accelerated testing to show the impact of decades of wear on the new mirrors in desert conditions" - I wonder how different these mirrors are to current mirrors. After alll, we've had solar mirrror array systems here in Southern California heating up gas for over twenty years - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Energy_Generating_Systems. I pass by one of them whenever I head up north to June or Mammoth Lake.
The article (and others I've googled) says nothing abut what the technology will be. I wonder if it would be like the ESA improvements for the satellites - http://www.rssd.esa.int/SA/PLANCK/include/payl/node5.html
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
...Italy just dropped all economical support to solar-termal energy.
...
photovoltaic still has subsides, but no more for solar-thermal.
and we were the 3rd country with most solar thermal in europe untill now.
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." -- Mark Twain
I don't see the big "kludge", myself. Is it the part where you hook it up to a bundle of wire and spin it around in a magnetic field to make electricity? I think that's pretty awesome too; you can move a whooole lot of electrons that way.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Having highly efficient mirrors might be very useful, if the beards in the Middle East continue to eagerly pursue their path to self-immolation.
Burning radioactive oil wouldn't be so good, but lining the resultant wasteland of friable radioactive glass with mirrors and then transmitting the non-radioactive electricity out would return the region to usefulness for humanity.
(Before you flame, observe both that "beards" applies to all branches of the followers of Abraham and that the compulsion to use nuclear weapons - to send humanity on a one-way trip - has more to do with insanity than religion.
I am, in fact, just being pragmatic.)
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
This makes we wonder, where did Google get people who know how do develop mirrors? Did they buy a smaller solar power company, hire a bunch of people, or reassign some computer engineers?
This is waaay better.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
And this being bad exactly how?
I mean a 300*300 km area of that tech suffices for all of humanity’s needs right now. With no rare materials, complex error-prone technology, or high costs.
I call that a pretty sweet deal.
Of course we will optimize it by the use of the right collector/core (imagine placing something else in the middle, like a special material or solar cell). But hey, until then, we’re very good with what we got. And the price... oh the price... Energy for next to nothing!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
A friend of mine who worked at Google at the time had clearly been involved in this project (although he didn't tell me...exactly) We were discussing alternative, sustainable power, and I've always been a fan of solar thermal -- he described in way more detail and depth than I thought possible the resource limits we'd run into if we tried to power America by solar thermal -- in particular the current mirrors in the prototype plants use a huge amount of aluminum, and scaling those plants up to make more than a rounding-error of our energy needs would take way more aluminum than we could forsee having. Plus, of course, it takes a ridiculous amount of electricity to refine the aluminum in the first place.
I was rather surprised, and checked his math...which was pretty accurate. I do think that other alternatives to aluminum are practical, and Google's going there.
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
the Rankine cycle[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle] is one of the best approximations to the Carnot in the real world. Thermodynamics wont let you get much better, and there are material constraints on how high you can get your top temperature. Combined cycle (gas turbine and ranking) power-plants let the top temperature get a little higher, and so more efficient, but there are issues with size (tends to be less power) and the energy security of gas. Fuel cells allow you to side step the thermodynamic and extract electrical energy directly from the chemical energy, but the fuel has to be very pure, and there are issues with sailing, finally nuclear fusion/fusion, again, are just glorified kettles for the top side of your rankine cycle, so glorified steam engines it is.
anyway, i quite like steam engines, did you never get taken to a steam rail way when you were small
Since I'm fond of flights of fancy...
Beam splitter, Fresnel lens, simple prisms, whatever works to separate different parts of the spectrum. Thermal energy going to thermal power generation, the rest going to solar cells that efficiently utilized that particular part of the spectrum.
The rest of course is the engineering.
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
Did they drop support because they couldn't get it to work well, or is it working well enough that no subsidies are needed anymore? Or is Italy just broke and dropping a lot of governmental spending in general?
The kludgy bit is that you go from heat->motion->electricity, with losses at each step. Maybe that's just good reuse, having already debugged both steps pretty thoroughly.
But after a century or so of power plants, it's starting to feel like optimization is no longer premature. The power plant is the very center of a tight loop, and worth optimizing.
Unfortunately, any time you replace a well-understood legacy system with a new one you get bugs, and the whole heat->electricity thing isn't yet anywhere near well library-quality code. It actually turns out to be less efficient, not more. But as a programmer you look at the inefficiencies and figure there's got to be a better way.
Some places have the deposit, some don't, and as you can see, even *with* a five cent deposit, most people think so little of that that they still toss them. Without a deposit, they are mostly all tossed. Some get scavenged and recycled, some don't, and many of the people who scavenge and recycle don't even bother with the buhzillions of food cans now that have steel tops and the rest of the can is aluminum. Thye'd have to cut the tops off and rinse out the cans so they don't bother.
Now ME, I just see them as fun targets, especially if you fill them with water so you get a big splasharooni from a hit ;)
Anyway, the point was I can't see us running out of aluminum soon, besides what is already here and could be recycled, the planet has plenty of bauxite.
Heck, out west in the desert, they have *thousands* of old junk airplanes made from aluminum sitting around. And the coming thing for new airplane construction is to go to carbon fiber and not use so much aluminum. I don't think goog will have any problems sourcing material for a big mirror project.
and hey, since when is 60 "old"!?! heheheh we call that "middle aged" now.
lawn, git, etc
We need someone to open-source a design of one of these setups so we can build these ourselves and power our own homes with our wasted front yard space ---- the trophy yard is dying with the baby boomers.
Or we could grow fruits/veggies in our yards and cut back on the 400 gallons of fuel/person used each year to bring us our groceries.
We might still be using steam, but glorification technology has advanced tremendously since the nineteenth century.
Modern glory engines generally achieve virtue ratings in the giga-archangel range on the Baden-Powell scale. The biggest problem is containment of the antikarma halo from contaminating the surrounding noosphere and uplifting our whole cultural discourse; in the worst case, this could create a self-perpetuating virtuous cycle, the so-called Shambala Syndrome. In some cases residents within fifty miles of glory stations have tested positive for elevated morals. There have even been unconfirmed reports of spontaneous canonisation, yet the International Glorification Commission still claims this technology is safe.
It's time to wake up, people. The smoking gun could come in the form of clouds and trumpets.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC