As part of the Back to the Future alternative energy series, The New York Times has an article today about the rising demand for solar thermal power plants, which use solar panels to heat water and operate a steam turbine.
Among the advantages cited:
On sunny afternoons, those 10 plants would produce as much electricity as three nuclear reactors, but they can be built in as little as two years, compared with a decade or longer for a nuclear plant. Some of the new plants will feature systems that allow them to store heat and generate electricity for hours after sunset.
In addition, solar thermal can provide energy more reliably than wind can, and it provides the most energy during mid-day, when energy usage peaks.
This technology has been around since the '80s, but according to the article, the low cost of natural gas made solar thermal plants too expensive. Now, rising energy prices and opposition to coal are making solar thermal power more appealing. There's still a cost disparity between the cost-per-kilowatt-hour of coal power vs. solarthermal power: 7 cents/kwh versus 15 cents/kwh. (Although they clearly aren't taking into account the planet-destroying costs of coal.)
The article also talks about potential effects on biodiversity if solar thermal plants become widespread -- obviously, if miles and miles of land are taken up for piping-hot solar panels, that could potentially be a bummer for wildlife:
Already, building a plant in California requires hiring a licensed tortoise wrangler to capture and relocate endangered desert tortoises.
But those problems seem minor in comparison to problems with coal. You know, little things like dangerous working conditions, filthy carbon emissions, and the potential for giant, 30-year underground fires that swallow up whole towns.
Maybe that's just me.
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Comments
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sunflower Posted 6:00 am
06 Mar 2008
Modern solar technologies will be located near where people live, and be cost effective sources of heat, cooling, and power without subsidies. NYT is in the muck telling old stories about expensive old solar technology. We can do much better. And do it in more diverse climates.
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Lauren Guite Posted 7:33 am
06 Mar 2008
According to Earth: The Sequel (pg45), "it is the only clean energy technology with the near-term potential to match coal not only in price (which some windmills can do) but also in scale..."
One such solar thermal start up, Ausra, has been working on building several of these plants in Australia, Portugal, and California. Their website claims that "using Ausra's current solar technologies, all U.S. electric power, day and night, can be generated using a land area smaller than 92 by 92 miles."
More innovative companies working to stop global warming are highlighted in this video.
Lauren Guite
Environmental Defense Fund
finding the ways that work
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christophersj Posted 8:08 am
06 Mar 2008
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Karen Street Posted 8:42 am
06 Mar 2008
Matthew Wald often makes mistakes on nuclear power.
The first new nuclear power plant with new technology should be coming online a decade from now. That does not mean that it takes a decade to make a nuclear power plant, but that the first one or two will take that long, much of that time spent by NRC getting the details right and then the first time construction people getting the details right.
Meanwhile, 10 solar thermal plants for a few hours each day can produce almost as much electricity as three older, two newer, nuclear power plants do all day long. The solar thermal can be built in less time, especially if you have to build nuclear power plants one at a time and don't have to build power lines to the solar thermal plants.
Let's support (almost) all the low GHG sources.
There is good overlap, but not complete overlap, between when electricity is needed and solar thermal; it actually requires a few hours of storage if it is to be used in great quantity.
I'm thrilled they're being built. But they won't provide much of the world's, or even US, electricity for some years.
A Musing Environment
Karen Street
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GreyFlcn Posted 8:43 am
06 Mar 2008
_
That said, I like Google's approach.
Solar Thermal with Heat Storage
Hot Rock Geothermal
High Altitude Wind
All of em have the potential to scale rapidly, with no real supply chain limitations, and high reliability.
And any single one of them hitting pay-dirt could be all we could ever need.
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sunflower Posted 10:41 am
06 Mar 2008
Why solar power? To save natural gas? Well then say so. Examine solar that saves natural gas directly for all applications like heating, cooling, industrial process heat, power, and so on. There are wide assortments of solar technologies that are cost effective for the displacement of natural gas. When done right, solar is cost effective compared to oil, gas, coal, and electricity. Do not buy the argument that solar must be subsidized, in the desert, and is still not competitive. Damn lies. Not true.
For the engineers out there: Ausra is a 30-sun concentrator with horrendous cosine loses and very low thermal to electric efficiencies. Vinod will polish Ausra and sell it.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:55 pm
06 Mar 2008
This is what storage does. The hot oil melting wax, for instance, would bridge the cloudy gaps. Stabilizing the output.
The better, cheaper design that Google is funding melts salt at a much higher temperature. Mirrors direct the solar energy to a tower where it is collected to melt the salt, then the water is boiled from the heat stored in the molten salt.
Allowing longer term storage, 6 hours it says in the times article, with evacuated insulation like a thermos bottle.
Transporting the heat with hot oil over a square mile is inefficient. With the tower method the light itself does the transportation, focused on the central tower. The older technology heating oil with trough collectors is obsolete already.
The solar tower energy system should not be done on wilderness desert land, it should be located on factory roofs or on land already destroyed by industrial or mining use.
A portion of the revenue generated by the solar syatem should be used to rehabilitate these sites back to natural conditions. Industrial sites and factories will already have power lines nearby.
The mirrors in the tower system have a very low impact on the land, unlike this trough system in the Times article.
Concentrating solar PV and heat cogeneration mounted on rooftops will already compete with the tower system on cost per kwh and the power can be stored as heat or cold with geo heat exchange heating/cooling. A 10 cent per kwh subsidy direct to homeowners for these systems would make it beat this technology to mass production and adoption.
the solar tower technology is not something to subsidize heavily, let energy intensive industries use it on factory roofs and over parking lots.
And use the solar furnace heat directly for heating production materials, then cogenerate electric power from the waste heat as the molten material cool. Glass and metal recycling and silicon refining would be good industrial uses for this scheme.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Sam Wells Posted 2:48 am
07 Mar 2008
Onward through the fog
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amazingdrx Posted 3:06 am
07 Mar 2008
GHG free desalinization can provide green where drought has produced firestorm and desert, and those green areas create clouds that reflect solar energy.
The multiple source energy harvested by floating platforms tapping into ocean and wind energy provides steady power as well as peak power related to wind and waves. Desalinization can store the peak energy as fresh water, water that helps cure climate disaster.
This is great technology, great economy reviving technology.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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sunflower Posted 3:15 am
07 Mar 2008
For storage, pile drive 6 inch steam pipes (ends capped) 100 feet into the sand, fill with 700F condensate from solar steam collectors, then allow steam discharge for 24 hour supply. Low cost and high efficiency. No fuss, no mess. Eliminates the need for molten salt, hot oil, wax, and dangerous pressure vessels.
These are the early primitive days of the solar age. The resource and cost of using solar energy does pencil out. Use the imagination.
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Lhogue Posted 4:33 am
07 Mar 2008
As the Environmental Impact Report on San Diego Gas & Electric's proposed Sunrise Powerlink transmission line shows, the greenhouse gas reductions provided by solar are outweighed by the greenhouse gas contributions involved with building and operating a long transmission line (a 150mile line carrying 1000MW, in this case).
Local, distributed generation, not massive industrial scale solar, is the wave of the future. If you want to check out an alternative that will meet San Diego's power needs, with a 50% reduction in GHG, check out this lecture. Or read about it at www.sdsmartenergy.org.
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christophersj Posted 4:33 am
07 Mar 2008
Right, nobody wants a foolish endeavor wasting time. But solar thermal doesnt look like a waste of time. Its just imperfect. But they do work and the one in Arizona will even turn a profit in few years.
The more the merrier.
Google's ideas do look good. I wonder if you can put ad space on a high altitude kite...
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:04 am
07 Mar 2008
Any good links on small solar towers? here's a wild animation of a km high solar tower
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amazingdrx Posted 5:13 am
07 Mar 2008
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2006/11/27 ...
Yes, renewable distributed smart grid technology and conservation will leave us with the existing power grid that has 5 times the transmission capacity that is needed.
Plenty of room for excess renewable power to be exported across the grid to backup a wind and solar dip in another region.
With modern solar PV cogeneration and geo heat exchange heating/cooling storage, working through a smart grid, San Diego could actually export power from it's rooftops!
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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sunflower Posted 5:13 am
07 Mar 2008
Cool drawings from Bill Gross at IdeaLabs.
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amazingdrx Posted 5:20 am
07 Mar 2008
We are talking fields of mirrors (plastic ones) that all focus solar energy on a collector in a tower. That titanic heat melts salt for energy storage or boils water for steam directly, or both. Google is in on it. It looks good. Better, cheaper mirrors were the main improvement.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 5:31 am
07 Mar 2008
Using CO2 collected from from biogas grid backup power plants) to substitue for the coal and oxygen in steel making?
That would even cause steel manufacturing to take some CO2 back out of the atmosphere if there was a shortage of CO2 from biogas.
All other industries that have high heat processes would want solar furnace power too. This would also produce titanic amounts of cogenerated waste heat, that couldf be turned into very cheap clean kwhs after the sun goes down.. all night long.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:41 am
07 Mar 2008
So maybe you could replace some of that with solar?
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sunflower Posted 5:46 am
07 Mar 2008
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Robco1 Posted 9:13 am
07 Mar 2008
There are also some interesting developments in urban wind power with a company here in Chicago called Aerotecture. Their turbines use a helical structure to take advantage of relatively low gusting winds generated by skyscrapers in the urban environment and avoid the spin-off and ice-shedding problems of traditional windmills. Coupled with local solar and augmented by solar-thermal, geothermal, ocean, etc. and we just might get away from fossil fuels in time. Here's hoping!
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amazingdrx Posted 3:47 pm
07 Mar 2008
I like the idea of powering factories with solar furnace/electric cogeneration mirror and tower systems on their roof. Even in less effective solar opocations that 250 degree process heat that sunflower mentioned could be captured and stored for 24/7 operation.
This kind of installation, and large wind machines, where suitable, and offshore floating wind/wave energy systems providing power for factories could contribute a lot of power to a distributed renewable smart grid.
The beauty of this plan is that most power would be generated on rooftops and very few large systems, like wind, wave, and solar thermal would be needed. And they could have a very low impact on the land, maybe even a positive rehabilitative effect through a fraction of power grid generation revenues devoted to reclaiming devestated industrial sites.
Too bad we can't seem to get politicians to get interested in this. They dwell on lobbyist schemes instead, clean coal, nukes, ethanol fuel farming. Conservation with plugin hybrid vehicles and geo heat exchange heating/cooling is almost unknown. Even though bush has solar PV and geo heat exchange at his "ranch".
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:22 am
08 Mar 2008
http://greyfalcon.net/nuclearwater.png
However, given it's smaller scale, and incremental design, there's a pretty sweet option out there.
Use almost no water :P
http://www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/pdfs/2007/dersch_dry_co ...
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amazingdrx Posted 5:17 am
08 Mar 2008
With adsorption cooling, the waste heat from solar thermal could even be used for air conditioning, in cities like vegas or pheonix peak solar cooling production could be stored in malls and other large buildings.
Cogeneration would work well with solar furnace installations.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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sunflower Posted 1:15 am
09 Mar 2008
With the price of polysilicon soaring from $20 per kilogram to $300 per kilogram in the past five years, Chinese companies are eager to fill the gap. The dark side
Another reason to use PV concentrators.
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