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."

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Power?

[Coren22]

I guess they figured out thier electric bills were too high.

Re:Power?

[Fred_A]

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.

Re:Power?

[Cheesetrap]

I actually remember seeing test setups of this tech 18 years ago, not a new technology, but still very cool.

Try 18 hundred years... While stories of Archimedes' Mirror may have been greatly exaggerated (Mythbusters and a couple of independent projects have recreated the effect but with an infeasible time-frame for warfare), the concept and 'technology' of parabolic mirrors or arrays to concentrate solar heat are pretty ancient. Also, Death Ray FTW. :D

Re:Power?

[emilper]

Glorified ? How about "highly sophisticated" ? Even a nuclear submarine is powered by a "glorified steam engine".

Re:Power?

[FooAtWFU]

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.

Re:Power?

[Hurricane78]

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!

Re:Power?

[jfengel]

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.

Re:Power?

[Yvan256]

Isn't it extremely dangerous? It could escape the power plant by pretending to be a cop and then go on a killing rampage.

Re:Power?

[joocemann]

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.

Re:Power?

[lennier]

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.

An interim solution

[CRCulver]

It will need to do accelerated testing to show the impact of decades of wear on the new mirrors in desert conditions.

Solar panels don't have to last too long when fusion is only thirty years away, am i rite?

If Google would run candidates....

[jnmontario]

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.

Re:If Google would run candidates....

[ceoyoyo]

Ah, corporatism. Putting for profit businesses in charge NEVER leads to trouble.

Testing?

[filesiteguy]

" 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

meanwhile....

[Luke_22]

...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.
...

Google and Govt talk:

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

From the article:

Weihl said Google had not intended to invest much more in early years, but that there was little to buy. "I would say it's reasonable to be a little bit discouraged there and from my point of view, it's not right to be seriously discouraged," he said. "There isn't enough investment going into the early stages of investment pipeline before the venture funds come into the play." The U.S. government needs to provide more funds to develop ideas at the laboratory stage, he said. "I'd like to see $20 billion or $30 billion for 10 yrs (for the sector)," Weihl said. "That would be fabulous. It's pretty clear what we have seen isn't enough."

Google: "Government, please throw in some 20 or 30 billion dollars to into solar energy research"

Govt: Nah, deficits are high. We dont have money. It should be done by the private sector. 20 or 30 billion dollars is too much way too much we cant afford it It is not a trivial sum like 780 billion dollars to clean up after wall street greedy moneybags. Tell you what? Grow too big to fail. Then come back asking for a couple of trillion dollars. Then we will be able to do it. OK?

Re:Google and Govt talk:

[radish]

Is there an "Ignorant cliche, -1"? No...oh well.

Where did they get the people?

[TorKlingberg]

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?

Re:Where did they get the people?

[AK Marc]

They hire professional problem solvers. They just redirected a small portion of problem solving power to this.

Re:Solar Beards

[Forty Two Tenfold]

This is waaay better.

Talked to a friend at Google about this

[Thagg]

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

Use More

[Wardish]

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.

Why?

[zogger]

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?

Did Google misinterpret

[Anonymous Coward]

Did Google misinterpret the reason that Oracle bought Sun?

deposits in town, deposits out in ther stix

[zogger]

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

Re:Refining Aluminum?

[Savior_on_a_Stick]

Aluminum is refined from bauxite and takes a huge amount of energy to produce initially.

It is extremely rare to find it in free form.

"substance that produces steam"

[bencoder]

in which the sun's energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam

What is this mythically substance that produces steam when heated up?

Re:Solar thermal's biggest problem

[russotto]

Ironically, its the people who care very little about the environment that are using the arguments of those short sighted environmentalists to shoot down things like wind-power and hydroelectric generation concepts!

It's to be expected. Consider a conversation between a cigar-chomping flint-hearted power company executive and his favorite toady:

E: Smothers! What's the hold-up with the new coal plant?
S: Well sir, some environmentalists say coal smoke causes acid rain and carbon dioxide ruins the climate
E: Poppycock and nonsense.... but I suppose a hold-up is a hold-up. How do they expect us to make electricity if they're holding up our plant?
S: Sir, they suggest we build alternative energy
E: Alternative energy? What, I burn $100 bills? A man can't make an honest business nowadays...
S: Sir, they think we should make hydroelectric, wind, and solar generation.
E: Well, I suppose we can try it. Let me know how it goes, Smothers.

(later)
S: Sir, I have the reports on our pilot hydroelectric, wind, and solar generation projects
E: Good, good, let's hear the summary
S: Well sir, our hydroelectric plant was stopped by environmentalists complaining it would flood sensitive wetlands habitat and stop migrating fish.
E: Mmm... and the others
S: The wind plant was shut down after environmentalists said our windmills chopped up birds
E: Harumph, we should just put in a restaurant... ha, ha, get it Smothers?
S: Yes sir, wind power and ground poultry, very funny sir.
E: Well, solar? They couldn't have found anything wrong with solar, right Smothers?
S: Actually, sir, they said just building the plant would disturb the desert environment and threaten many species of desert animal and plant. They said that bringing in the water we need would deplete the aquatic environment. And they said that as a whole, the plant would increase the albedo of the desert and result in damage to the climate
E: WHAT? What do these people want us to do, sit around in the dark?
S: Uhh, I don't know sir
E: Call our lawyers! Call our lobbyists! I want that coal plant back on the fast track. That's the last time I'll pay any attention to any of that environmentalist nonsense.
S: Yes sir.