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Massive Solar Updraft Towers Planned For Arizona
MikeChino writes "Australia-based EnviroMission Ltd recently announced plans to build two solar updraft towers that span hundreds of acres in La Paz County, Arizona. Solar updraft technology sounds promising enough: generate hot air with a giant greenhouse, channel the air into a chimney-like device, and let the warm wind turn a wind turbine to produce energy. The scale of the devices would be staggering — each plant would consist of a 2,400 foot chimney over a greenhouse measuring four square miles. The Southern California Public Power Authority has approved EnviroMission as a provider, although there’s still plenty of work to be done before the $750 million, 200 megawatt project can begin."
A nuclear plant would use maybe 50 acres and produce a gigawatt. I think the capital expense is comparable. What is the benefit here?
Regards,
Jason
LOL
Seems the article's author cut off the last part of the quote. I think it continues
You want to use public land? You have to put up with government bullshit. Buy some land, do whatever the hell you want on it.
From a pure stimulus standpoint, sure, but wouldn't it be nice if we at least got something tangible out of our money too, instead of just consultant reports? At least the make-work programs in the 1930s left us with a bunch of improvements to the national park infrastructure, murals in various public places, etc.--- in fact a good deal of that WPA stuff is still in use.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't accept your premise.
(Or, I find your lack of faith disturbing.)
Though science, we can provide a first-world lifestyle for all those people. We can build enough nuclear plants to provide enough energy to supply them all with power, and desalinate seawater, and still have plenty left over.
Nuclear fuel is that abundant. You can even extract it from seawater. Growth problems go away with the application of enough electricity.
Besides: population growth is self-limiting. Affluent people have fewer children. As we see more people enjoy a first world lifestyle, with its education and contraceptives, we'll see worldwide population sizes level off just as it they have in first world nations.
The numbers in TFA work out to an efficiency of 1.9% for 4 square miles and a 2000 foot chimney. That's probably the limit for what can be economically built. Even if they could get better efficiency for a larger system, it's not going to scale up much. They're already fighting serious problems with airflow resistance. Photovoltaics routinely exceed 20%.
In their favor, storing an hour or more of heat shouldn't be too difficult, so the output will be more regular that photovoltaics.
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6.9 billion, perhaps. We're nearly to 6.8 billion right now and the high UN projection is to hit 9 billion around 2030. Medium projection is 9 billion around 2050, and low is never reaching it. (Source)
The good news is that we can actually do multiple things at once. There's no need to completely ignore one issue just because there's another one that you see as more pressing.
Your mind is still in the "small is beautiful" rut. Nuclear power plants are big because big plants are more efficient and easier to regulate, which makes them cheaper and safer. Hyperion is a crock.
Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I'm pretty sure all the energy that the sun will dump into these greenhouses was going to end up there anyway...
The project will decimate 2000 acres of desert habitat for 200 megawatts output. Palo Verde nuclear power plant, also in Arizona, spans 4000 acres of desert and produces 3.2 gigawatts.
Nuclear power is 8x more efficient in land use alone.
This sort of news upsets me... Why do we spend countless dollars on searching for more energy if the basic problem is not addressed first: There are too many humans and until we figure out how to control human population growth we are doomed sooner or later. ...we'll be able to reduce human population to something that Earth can sustain.
Course manouvers. The Universe is infinite, space is big, and it's all out there for us to tap. And considering the scale of the playpen, I have utterly no qualms about invading it with our polluting presence. We could grow to a population of quintillions or more and not even be noticed on the cosmic scale. I refuse to feel sorrow over our biological imperatives. Far from feeling any sort of sorrow, I take a sunny fresh joy in watching people discussing ways to allow us to live and thrive while using what we have in the most efficient possible way, until the time comes for us to leave the nest and fly. Go Technology!
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
these couldn't be built for a small fraction the price by using an atmospheric vortex engine instead of a tower.
It is estimated that it would be possible to establish a self-sustaining vortex to demonstrate the feasibility of the process with a station 30 m in diameter under ideal conditions. Learning to control large vortices under less than ideal conditions would be a major engineering challenge. Developing the process will require determination, engineering resources; and cooperation between engineers and atmospheric scientists. There will be difficulties to overcome, but they should be no greater than in other large technical enterprises.
Translation: I can haz millions for R&D?
OTOH, Solar Chimneys can be built today.
So I'm guessing that's why Arizon isn't using an undeveloped technology that may not even be workable.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Might I suggest that instead of dumping the warm air into the upper atmosphere, we pump it to Minnesota? Please?
But seriously, this is essentially harvesting energy that's going to waste. Since we're using it to turn turbines and extract energy out of it, technically, it ought to result in a net cooling of the air rather than a heating (although when you consider the waste heat when the energy is used, it probably all balances out in the end -- well, it would have to, wouldn't it, unless you're suggesting the conservation of energy is being violated somewhere).
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
It's very annoying how many ignorant people throw around "solar" as a synonym for photovoltaïc.
Of course solar energy is actually responsible for all life on earth, and the ultimate source of power behind pretty much everything on the planet, but even solely in terms of conscious human implented technology solar energy is a broad field with photovoltaïcs being one small and relatively new and immature branch. Solar thermal technology is often far more efficient and less expensive, and just as much 'solar' as any other sort. The easiest and most efficient use is direct heating of water and air to displace the use of electricity to do the same job. Solar-thermal technologies also show some promise for power production, although this particular project looks to me far less likely to ever be useful than more conventional "power towers" which do not require such extravagances as 2400 foot chimneys (can you imagine the difficulty not just in building, but in maintaining that?) and convert solar energy to electricity using an extremely mature technology - the steam turbine.
The big savings for the forseeable future is still to be found not in using the sun to produce electricity at all, but simply to displace it. The $750million proposed cost of this plant (which is likely to increase several times before a single watt is ever produced by it) would be much better spent replacing electric water heaters with efficient solar water heaters, for instance. The 200 megawatts this plant is touted to eventually produce is only a little more than was displaced in the US in 2008 alone through installation of solar hot water heaters for domestic use alone (keeping in mind that market penetration for this technology in the US is still miniscule there is room for that to expand many times) and is only a little more than a quarter of what solar pool heating units displaced in the same year. Passive solar home design is another potential area of savings where the current market penetration is even lower, and the potential savings enormous.
Given the relative efficiencies and costs, it really makes no sense to me to be throwing all this money at speculative schemes for electrical generation while there remains so much more potential for displacement. Even confining this to the states where solar energy is most reliable and appropriate - the "sun belt" - the potential reduction in electrical usage is staggering and dwarfs what a project like this could possibly produce. One day when >90% of homes located between southern california and the florida/georgia/carolina coast have passive solar designs and thermosiphon hot water systems in place, THEN it might make sense to start throwing money at solar power generation on a large scale, but for the time being I just dont see it.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Never been to Thailand, I take it?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
A giant greenhouse, designed to heat massive ammounts of air, and dump it into the cold upper atmosphere...
So we have given up and are going to proactively warm the earth's atmosphere directly now?
Don't confuse controlled convection with global warming. The ground everywhere always absorbs sunlight, which heats it and the air near the ground. That air then ruses upwards. All they are doing is putting a roof over the hot ground to channel the air into a turbine. It's analogous to building a dam in a river to harness potential energy that is normally wasted. The earth doesn't absorb any more energy than it normally would... unless they are lowering the albedo of the ground under the greenhouse. Of course, it would be more efficient for them to paint the ground black.
If they did color the ground, you would have increased global energy absorption. (Much like you get frmo using solar panels...) But you would also be generating CO2 free energy, so you could burn less coal. In the end, lowering CO2 values would win out, since with less greenhouse gases in the air, the more heat would be radiated back out to space. And that is ignoring the carbon savings from not having to mine as many coal or hydrocarbons.
They should put these over parking lots in hot areas of the world. Or maybe we could just put a big one over Texas. They all use air conditioning there anyway, so they would never know the difference.