Solar Tower of Power Finds Home

[phantom power]

(I had wondered if they were still planning to do this, looks like it)

The quest for a new form of green energy has taken a significant step with the purchase of a 25,000-acre sheep farm in the Australian outback. The huge alternative energy project isn't driven by manure, but by a 1-kilometer-high thermal power station called the Solar Tower.

Announced several years ago, the 3,280-foot Solar Tower is one of the most ambitious alternative energy projects on the planet: a renewable energy plant that pumps out the same power as a small reactor but is totally safe. If built, it will be nearly double the height of the world's tallest structure, the CN Tower in Canada.

The Solar Tower is hollow in the middle like a chimney. At its base is a solar collector -- a 25,000-acre, transparent circular skirt. The air under the collector is heated by the sun and funneled up the chimney by convection -- hot air rises. As it rises, the air accelerates to 35 mph, driving 32 wind turbines inside the tower, which generate electricity much like conventional wind farms.

But the Solar Tower has a major advantage over wind farms and solar generators: It can operate with no wind, and 24 hours a day. Thanks to banks of solar cells, the tower stores heat during the day, allowing it to produce electricity continuously.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66694,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

[applegrove]

1. Wow!! Sounds like a plan ! n/t

[phantom power]

4. One thing I kind of like about it: it's appealingly low-tech

Basically, we're just talking about an assload of concrete, plexiglass, and some wind-turbines. Not to disrespect the engineering challenges of building a structure that size and height (whatever they are). I imagine the simplicity makes operating cost and maintenance fairly inexpensive.

I do wonder about settling. What *does* happen to the ground, when you place a kilometer-high column of concrete on top of it...? Wouldn't want to screw up the geological assessments!

[applegrove]

8. That part of it is a little funny. Perhaps they could just run the tube up

the side of a mountain of something. We have lots of 'extra' 6000 foot high mountains in Canada!!

[phantom power]

9. That's an interesting idea. It would be harder to keep it nice and

straight, which probably is important for the most efficient flow. But it sure would provide more support. You could probably get a lot more height that way, without the difficulties of building a free-standing tower a kilometer high.

[applegrove]

10. I mean if it is concrete or plastic the hot air is not going to be

escaping any time soon. But you know what else it means ... it means those Dam Albertans will just keep getting rich! They own all the mountains too!

Now the US will have to invade all the mountainous countries. Well they already have afghanistan.

[HereSince1628]

2. Fun, I saw the dream of this in a popular mechanix back in the late

1960's, though it didn't have the "skirt" back then.

SO when do I get my FLYING CAR???????????

[vpigrad]

3. It's been talked about for years...

don't expect it to be allowed to be built. The repukes love their radioactive garbage too much to allow something sensible to be built.

[Salviati]

5. AAARRRGHHH!!

"it's unlikely one will be built in the United States. The federal government is pinning hopes on hydrogen as a new energy source"


Hydrogen is NOT an energy source! It is a STORAGE mechanism for energy! It's like a freaking battery, you can't go you and mine batteries, you need to charge them using some other form of energy.

[Oreo]

6. That way somebody will make money off of it

and W will be the hero of all his oil buddies even after the oil dries up.

[phantom power]

7. The gomers who've taken over our government don't know

the difference. And they're proud of their scientific illiteracy.

Thinking about this always reminds me of that scene from "The Stand", where that couple just set off a bomb, and the guy turns the woman and says:

"We're damned now, aren't we."

And she nods her head slowly:

"Yes... yes, we are."

[applegrove]

11. And I hear more people have those water pumps that pump

water down 40 feet where it picks up heat from the ground and passes it on to the household. But that only works when you live in a very cold climate (thus the big difference between the cold water from above ground and the warm ground 40 t0 90 feet down or something).

But it is nice to be thinking vertically (up & down) about energy rather than laterally (horizontal push to middle east). Less money in it for big oil. ha ha ha

[phantom power]

12. A buddy of mine built a house with that system.

They only buried the heat-exchanging tubes about six feet down. He lives in Michigan. They work great. Pump heat from the ground into the house in winter, and pump it out of the house into the ground in the summer. Either direction, it's very power-efficient, since the earth makes such a good heat reservoir.

For acreage-limited sites, I've heard of them just drilling down. My buddy has 10 acres, and there was no pre-existing structure, so he was free to stay shallow and wide, I guess.

[applegrove]

13. I have no idea of the mechanics but loved the idea since I first heard of

it! 40 to 90 feet was just a guess. I'm sure 6 feet and just under the frost would do fine.

[phantom power]

14. It's pretty impressive. He took me on a tour of the setup in his basement

and it reminded me of being inside a submarine. Big valve manifolds, filling up an entire wall, 2-inch copper pipes everywhere.

The electric pump that runs it all draws something like 150 amps at start-up. He ran a 400 amp electrical service to his house. It must run more efficiently after startup, or it seems like it wouldn't be much of an energy saver.

[NNadir]

15. This an interesting system.

I very much doubt though that it is "totally safe." This is an untested and untried technology after all, and the power rating, 200 Megawatts, is tiny. Generally lots of people die in the construction of extremely tall structures and I note that steel and mass, contrary to what people try to tell you, have a real greenhouse gas cost, whether used to construct solar systems or other types of systems.

Assuming that the system comes in a the lowest cited cost, it will cost $500 million dollars. At 200 Megawatts, this would be the equivalent of a 1000 MWe nuclear plant that costs $2.5 billion dollars. If it comes in at $750 million dollars this plant will have Shoreham like numbers on a dollar/watt basis, almost 4 billion dollars per 1000 MWe, the Shoreham nuclear plant being considered one of the worst financial power generation disasters in history. If the actual cost overruns the stated estimates given, I predict it will actually never be built, or at least never finished.

If this system is built, too, it is likely to be a one shot deal. I can only imagine the NIMBY that would accompany an effort to built thousands of power stations taller by a factor of two than the Petronas towers.

When it comes to solar systems, I am a big fan of parabolic mirror systems. They function well, are economical, generally non-polluting, simple to build, simple to maintain and highly reliable. They're not suitable everywhere of course, but in the right place these systems are spectacular, if less dramatic, renewable energy installations.

Then too, there are always wind farms; cheap, clean, and generally extremely safe.

[NickB79]

16. 25,000 acres for only 200 MW of power?

For the Outback of Australia, or the center of the Sahara desert, this looks wonderful. I doubt you'd have an easy time finding enough land in any developed country to build even a few dozen of these. At least with wind turbines, you can grow crops around them, or graze cattle under them.

[applegrove]

17. okay that part is sounding a little weird too. I don't know my eletrical

engineering.