Slashdot Mirror
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."
They should build it in Washington DC
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria -
these couldn't be built for a small fraction the price by using an atmospheric vortex engine instead of a tower.
Present day. Present time.
I've been watching Enviromission not build a solar tower in regional Victoria (Australia) for a decade now. Not building one in the United States is a real step up for these guys.
Czech language for absolute beginners
Is there some efficiency to be gained by building a four square mile device over, say, 2560 one acre devices? Energy efficiency? Cost? It seems like there's a lot of risk in building one giant unit.
-Peter
Hm.. My first thought was "Perfect for one big ass Pot farm..." ^__^
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
This thing does not ADD any energy to the atmosphere. It EXTRACTS energy from it.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I call bullshit. If environmental activists are protesting in a desert location, are they not Browns?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
This DOES (essentially) reduce thermal energy in the atmosphere.
:)
Typically, the solar energy just heats up the ground, and also bounces around in the atmosphere and heats it up. This thing works by trapping the energy in a small area (greenhouse) and then using some of that heat to generate electricity. By the time the air is pumped out into the open atmosphere, it has less heat energy than if the thing wasn't there to begin with.
This really boils down to being just like a photovoltaic panel. Rather than the Sun wasting its energy heating up the atmosphere, we use the energy to make electricity... which we then waste by turning electricity back into heat which heats up the atmosphere.
-Bill
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
Back in the 70s there was a proposal to build a very tall cylinder (1 mile or so), inject water mist at the top, and let the resulting downdraft drive a turbine a ground level. Interesting idea, fairly well developed and into the engineering stage. Of course, nobody funded actually building one. The engineer who designed it couldn't overcome the skeptics, and nobody thought it would be competitive with cheap natural gas/oil-fired generators.....
What precisely do you think they're trying to do? Where do you think this thermal difference comes from exactly? Every single process that generates usable electrical power generates thermal energy. Simple thermodynamics dictates that a process must be less than 100% efficient and must create more disorder than order. So instead of converting coal and air into CO2, electrical power and heat; we're converting solar thermal energy into electrical power and waste heat. The thermal energy is already there and is going to waste otherwise.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
No, no, no, you have it all wrong!
Amerika will pay Australia to buy from an American corporation. The American corporation will in turn import all the raw materials from china and help the Australian firm find a bunch of minimum wage mexicans to build the thing.
The only question is... which south american country will supply the hookers and blow for this project?
profit! Half mile high tower? Pffft
A 4 square mile greenhouse in the middle of the dessert?
I, for one, will not stand up to these people interrupting dessert!
I call bullshit. If environmental activists...
There isn't any "if" involved here. Feinstein is sprinkling "national monuments" all over the Mojave to prevent solar projects.
link
link
No development of any kind, anywhere, under any circumstances, ever.
EnviroMission has been failing in Australia for at least half a decade. They aren't going to get anywhere in the US.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
George W. Bush is already scheming how to dodge the updraft.
Coal plants make up the vast majority of the power plants in the US and are definitely the most environmentally damaging form of energy production on the planet. Fixed that for you. Coal plant emit more radioactive material (radon) than nuclear plants, in addition to sulphur, other pollutants, and carbon dioxide. Some of this could be cleaned up through better smokestack scrubbers, but from an environmental impact standpoint coal is definitely the most expensive energy source.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Many, if not most wastewater (sewage) treatment plants in the US produce a net energy surplus, which is then returned to the grid.
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.
You keep using that word...
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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
Do you suffer from MUS (Multiple Urine Streams)? Are your trips to the bathroom blighted by UPTs (Unpredictable Piss Trajectories)? Well, fear not, you are not alone. Research has shown that in 99% of cases, MUS and UPTs are caused by two factors; either debris trapped in your glans, or a poorly configured foreskin. Well, your toilet seat soaking days could now be over, as a revolutionary GIMP plugin written by prolific rock-ballad artist Meatloaf will solve *all* your bathroom carpet dampening needs.
Simply use your favourite digital camera/camera phone to take a photograph of your penis before you are about to urinate, transfer it to your Linux-based laptop, and Meatloaf's incredible software processes the image using advanced techniques like Neural Nets, Stochastic Sampling and Genetic Algorithms to analyse the configuration of your bell-end, and give advice helping you to avoid both MUS and UPTs. The software is also written in 100% x86 assembly language, taking advantage of Meatloaf's decades of experience working with Intel's modern processors, to deliver accurate results in seconds.
Order it now, and banish piss soaked carpets from your life forever.
I tried this and now my penis looks really blurry and pixelated.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm guessing it will kill every rabbit and turtle up there.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
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.
You vastly underestimate them. In addition to their US and Australian projects they are also not building one in Namibia .
The Namibian project is more ambitious as it will be used also to grow food in the hot and windy conditions under their greenhouse.
Yup, we do this... We generate about 1/2 of our power from the methane off our digesters. (I work for a wastewater plant).
We still burn off a lot of methane - it's not cost effective yet to bring on another generator.
I've been toying with a waste methane coop and buy the extra methane from the WWTP. It would cost about $1/W to buy in, and then you'd be responsible for your share of O&M, and anything extra would be sold back to the grid.
I need about 200 investors at $3K ea. Think of all the green credits you get.
So we have given up and are going to proactively warm the earth's atmosphere directly now?
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.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
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.
There was a pretty big pilot, entirely successful one, built in Spain at the end of the 80s.
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.
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
Impractical. Lightning is dramatic(in large part because it wastes most of its energy in hard-to-collect light and sound); but doesn't actually contain that much energy, compared to the needs of even a modestly sized city.
The combination of "hardly enough energy to bother with, once you've averaged it out over the year" and "peak energy high and fast enough to blow a hole through anything not specifically engineered to take it" just isn't very exciting...
I hate to nitpick grammar, but I am pretty sure that "penis" is always masculine singular, i.e. "his penis."
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
A sign bearing the subject line, "Los Angeles City Limits" was stolen from the border of LA and hung by the side of the road in my home town in Bishop, CA some 260 miles away. It stood there several years. It was a political statement of the political reach of the LA Department of Water and Power, which at that time extended to leeching every drop of water our of our formerly verdant vally - an engineering feat that required making water run uphill for several miles. Apparently since then the limit has stretched to Arizona.
To the point of your post: if the LA city limits don't yet extend all the way to DC, I misdoubt they will soon.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Ole' Ms. Frankenstein there is trying to get certain specific areas of desert protected. Areas which were donated to the government by a private party, and which are known for their ecological importance.
There's nothing sinister about it. It's happening now, because there hasn't been any threat to the areas until solar starting becoming a big thing. And make no mistake, there is TONS of land elsewhere that will do the job just as well... It's just big corporations who didn't give a shit that were willing to destroy a de facto wilderness preserve because it happened to be just slightly more profitable for them.
There's no indication nor even suggestion that Franky will attempt to stamp that label on ANY OTHER AREAS, so there remains enough unprotected desert in So. Cal to supply the power needs of the entire country.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Lorena Bobbit had a penis. but threw it away.
Never been to Thailand, I take it?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
It was Glory Road. It was very educational. In it the Galactic Empress' commonest answer to every problem was: do nothing. Almost all problems solve themselves in time, given a wide enough view.
Well worth reading for this and a number of other reasons. It's the best representation of the "stream of consciousness" narrative I've seen, and it's a sexy good story. Actually I have a copy - and no, you can't borrow it. I wouldn't mind seeing what James Cameron could do with it.
You've got to give the Dean credit: whether it was stealing plot elements like the indifference of immortals to the travails of mortals or calculating orbits, the man was not afraid to do his homework.
/ Still hopes Hollywood stays away from Stranger in a Strange Land until I'm dead. I would have to go see it, and what they do to it would be sad.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Ass Pot: It's the good shit.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!