Technocrat

Industrial Scale Solar Thermal Electricity

zogger
Thu Dec 13 16:04:32 -0800 2007
Science.
manage

The first US production plant for manufacturing the components necessary for building solar thermal electrical production facilities will be built in Nevada. The corporation behind the effort, Ausra, says that they will be able to build four square miles of solar collectors per annum. Their system uses collectors, mirrors, fresnel lenses and accumulation tubes all leading to steam turbines to produce power, and they can store energy for continual production during the night and on cooler cloudier days. They claim cost parity with natural gas and soon to be parity with coal.

.."Solar thermal power plants use fields of mirrors to capture the sun's power to produce electricity without pollution. Ausra's innovations in mirror systems have brought the price of solar power down to the level of gas-fired power today, and will soon reach prices associated with coal-fired generation. Solar thermal power plants can store energy as heat to continue power generation at night and during cloudy periods."...more hot stuff there

Direct to a Flash based page on how the Ausra system works.

Industrial Scale Solar Thermal Electricity
Kai Howells
Thu Dec 13 19:01:32 -0800 2007
 manage
Technologies like this are exactly what we need at the moment. I would envisage that this system could either run with the water in a closed-loop, or it may be possible to run in an open-loop system, and using the steam, condense this to make pure drinking water from seawater or other undrinkable sources.

I was reading over their site and thought to myself "Australia would be a perfect place to set something like this up" only to read that the core technology was actually developed here in Australia by Ausra's founders in the 90's. Once again, it's another case of outstanding technology and innovation being developed in Australia, no-one here having the vision to back it, and it gets sold and commercialised overseas...
Industrial Scale Solar Thermal Electricity
Thomas Lord
Thu Dec 13 19:08:04 -0800 2007
 manage
Industrial pipelines tend to be like this.   People keep their cards close to their vest except as needed to raise capital until they're reading to go into production.

Nobody should relax or give up on panicing or anything but I have my fingers crossed we're going to see a "big basket" of patch-work technologies like this coming along over the next few years.

-t
Industrial Scale Solar Thermal Electricity
femto
Fri Dec 14 15:38:53 -0800 2007
 manage
I recently researched and wrote a case study on Ausra as part of a postgraduate course on engineering innovation and commercialisation.  Ausra's solar array seems to be a real winner.  A pity I didn't have a spare pile of cash when Prof. David Mills & co. were looking for Australian funding.  I would have given it to them.

Does anyone know whether they have yet proven their overnight thermal storage technology?  If they can get that right then they will no longer be a niche player but be in a position to take over the world's energy production.
Industrial Scale Solar Thermal Electricity
Deathridesahorse
Sun Jan 06 18:21:35 -0800 2008
 manage

No, but really looking forward to the running answer on that one!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

Do you have questions about the site? Write to bruce at perens.com . List of all articles we've ever published. Source Code Developer's Documentation RSS XML Sitemap XML News Sitemap Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict Valid CSS! [Valid RSS]