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Google Getting Into the Solar Mirror Business

Posted by Soulskill on from the reflects-well-on-them dept.

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."

7 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. If Google would run candidates.... by jnmontario · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Power? by Fred_A · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  3. meanwhile.... by Luke_22 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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
  4. Re:Power? by FooAtWFU · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Not really. It's good, proven technology. It is simple, with just a few moving parts that all move continuously in the same direction. It scales up very well: you get one big expensive steam turbine and you can point a boatload of cheap mirrors (/heat sources) at it. It takes advantage of some of the exotic properties of one of the most fascinating chemicals out there: Water. It produces no toxic waste to dispose of (not from the steam-engine part, at least... maybe a few lubricants you'll need to recycle, but that's pretty trivial). It doesn't distribute well (if you're piping hot working fluids around from one site to another, the heat tends to leak). Photovoltaics have it beat there, but they can't use all the spectrum. I suppose it doesn't scale down spectacularly well either; you might have better luck with a Stirling engine (more moving parts, though).

    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.
  5. Talked to a friend at Google about this by Thagg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  6. Use More by Wardish · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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! .
  7. Re:Power? by jfengel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.