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CA's First Molten Salt Energy Plant Approved
An anonymous reader writes "This year we've seen molten salt power plants start to pick up steam around the world, and now the technology is heating up stateside — California just approved its first molten salt energy plant. Designed by SolarReserve, the plant uses heliostats to focus thermal energy on a power tower filled with salt, which is able to reach very high temperatures (over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit) and can hold heat for an extraordinary length of time. Heat from this reserve of molten salt can then be pumped through a steam generator to provide on-demand energy long after the sun has set."
We get it already, heat jokes. Knock it off!
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
810.777 Kelvin .... nuff said.
Any way to work this out for home use? Without digging too deep, sounds suitable here in So Cal, but maybe the scale is too small to provide any real benefit
RTFA, looks like a giant penis...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert
Only if you ignore Solar II that ran from 1996 to 1999....
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Nothing from or controlled by Computer Associates should be trusted with warm water, much less molten salt.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Any excess salt left over after building the plant will be given to Gawker to help them improve their salted password hashes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Slightly off-topic (or on-topic considering the bigger picture). Can this method of heat concentration be used in the refinement of silicon. My understanding is that silicon production is expensive because of the energy needed to generate heat for the process.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon#Production
Why is this thing a tower? What if the system controlling the mirrors fails and suddenly they melt the tower, causing the molten salt to crash down on everything below?
Wouldn't it be safer to have that molten salt at ground level?
Their mascot? The Molten Salt Girl
And if they do this in situ in a salt mine, then what could go wrong?
Does anyone know exactly how long the reservoir tanks will keep the molten salt at a high enough temp to be useful? It says it can run for 24 hours but should an abnormally long string of cloudy days occur would this inhibit its usefulness? I realize it's California so it should be fairly sunny year round but I'm not familiar with the area it's being built at. Looked up the salt as well. (Had a hard time thinking it would be sodium chloride...) It's a mixture of sodium and potassium nitrate. I was a bit worried as nitrates tend to be violently reactive/explosive but this would only be with reducing agents. (so it should be relatively fairly safe if there was a leak.) However when potassium nitrate is heated above 560C (as it would in this plant) it turns to potassium nitrite and gives off oxygen. I'm curious if this would be an issue or if the sodium nitrate or something else in the mixture inhibits this. I imagine the oxygen would either stick in the solar collector part as a gas bubble or just be dissolved in the molten salt mixture. Anyone know? (My expertise is more in biochemistry than inorganic/industrial chemistry)
I though mythbusters proved that this was impossible.
They even reported their findings to the president.
Wake me up when it's over 9000.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Didn't I just see something about this on the Obama episode of Mythbusters?
I hope to see more and more of these solar plants built in the desert. They don't use arable land, don't burn fossil/organic fuels, and don't take food and make it into fuel. It could also be a major game changer for countries with a lot of desert land turning them into energy exporters.
According to Wikipedia the melting point is 801 degrees Celsius (1074 Kelvin).
The boiling point is 1686 K and the specific heat capacity is 864 Joules/Kilo/degree so you can do the numbers... :-)
No sig today...
And like so many other solar energy projects in California someone will sue to prevent it from being built because it's on "pristine desert habitat".
Roasted bird for lunch.
Other than that, I like this technology. Good old fashioned boiler plate technology with virtually no strategic metals involved. There's been some discussion about the temperature at which the salt melts but the article didn't say, or I missed seeing, which salt they were proposing to use. There are many different salts besides plain old sodium chloride and they'll all have different melting points and heat capacity.
From TFA: "SolarReserve is hoping to begin construction toward the end of 2011." Doesn't say when they plan to actually have it functioning. From their own press release on SolarReserve's website, they still have to get environmental approval from BLM and Wester Area Power Administration and "anticipates concluding financing arrangements by mid-2011 in order to begin full on-site construction in the third quarter of 2011."
Extra crispy.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
right... as if that sunlight wasn't already going to be making the desert hot. This just changes the distribution of heat a little.
What happens when a bird flies too near to the tower?
A republican will pretend to care about the environment long enough to sound like a complete asshole.
"When it rains, it burns"
If its being built in California, the anti-progress luddite envirowackos will either stop it, or the power wires necessary to distribute its electricity, or both. Nobody should try to build ANYTHING in California until it undergoes a serious attitude adjustment and embraces progress.
A bird dies.
Now take the time to go look up how many birds die from hitting high rise buildings every year. I'll maybe accept that windmills have an issuebut only because they are, by their very nature, positioned along common soaring and migration routes for many species. This is in the middle of the desert, with no special wind currents around it, the avian population is going to be as near to zero as you could hope for.
The real question is how do we use this green renewable source of energy to create petrochemicals so that we don't have to change our current habits in any way.
So, they're relying on thermal inertia, right? The salt stays hot even after the heat's turned off. So it can be used after the sun goes down.
Next time the sun comes, up, the salt's all cooled down, right? So, can they start generating right away, or do they have to wait for the salt to heat up again?
I mean, what keeps it from just shifting the generation time from "sunup to sundown" to "(sunup to sundown) + N hours"?
I'm beginning to suspect the Mythbusters intentionally blow it once in a while just to give the geeks something to argue about. That gets them more buzz.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It'll feel and avoid the massive intense heat put out by the tower long before it is in KFC range. Kinda how birds don't fly into the burning man sculptures in the desert, or forest fires.
I read it and got prematurely excited because I thought someone finally had the balls to ignore the anti-nuclear-as-a-religion crowd, and started building a Molten Salt Reactor. Then I read the article and found out it's just a new take on boring old solar. Oh well.... one day...
It's also the U.S. Postal Service abbreviation for California. But you already knew that.
I know that solar=thermal base-load approaches have been tried before - to my recollection pumping heated oil under pressure into rock strata to heat the rocks, while a different set of parallel pipes transfer the heat from the rocks to water turning it into steam. Kind of like man-made geothermal. I can't find the article now but my memory tells me they had some problems at a pilot plant (minor tremors or something?).
In any case, its great to see solar thermal being exploited as a source of base-load power. I'd love to see this all over the Australian outback.
CA is for Canada, you insensitive clod!
I've already tagged the article "!canada" and I urge others to do the same.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
As I pointed out in my logs about 3 years ago, we should build molten salt generators, BUT use these for excess electricity storage. By building SMALL units (1-20 MW) these will take 1 acre or less to run. Then set up tax breaks to encourage small businesses of these. With that approach, it could buffer energy from AE, but also, it would allow grabbing the energy at night (cheaply) and then selling it during the day (for a profit).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Great, now we combine this tech with desalinization and we can use the 'practically infinite' ocean water, once we figure out how to get that useless oil out of it. And really, it just means more land to develop...the upsides are never ending.
Any time you run a steam power plant, you have to figure out how to cool the condenser. Usually that means using a lake or a river as a source of cooling water; the next best is to use a "wet" cooling tower; what you don't want to have to use is a "dry" cooling tower.
A source of water for a lot of these things could be a problem in the desert, although I suppose you could use brackish water or other water not suitable for drinking. Then, if you are pumping such water from a well, where do you discharge it?
Not saying solar-thermal power is without merit or that the anti-progress faction is right about everything, but this plan does have the problem of cooling water in the desert.
Photovoltaic scamufacturers should be crapping their pants about now, and with good reason. Solar-thermal is about to show them up as the pork barrel frauds they've always been.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
So, you have a thousand mirrors pointing at a target, heating the salt in it to the melting point.
What in the world is that target made of? It has to be able to conduct heat, be immune to liquid sodium's effects, AND not melt or burn at 1500f+
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I'm a huge fan of puns, I just wanted to see how many people would reply with. :-D
"I tell ya, if I had a NaCl for every pun on here..." is definitely the best.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.