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."

Comments

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.

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

Did Google misinterpret

[Anonymous Coward]

Did Google misinterpret the reason that Oracle bought Sun?

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.