Perhaps if Firecracker George and I weren't so busy annoying my old and now long deceased dog with burning his little fuzzy butt using the concentrated energy of the sun via magnifying glasses on bored Sunday afternoons, we might actually be rich today.
Previous technology to harness the endless radiation eminating from the Sun has focused on solar panels that convert energy into electricity. This, of course, could provide endless amounts of free energy on a sunny day. The problem is trying to store up this energy for later use when sunlight isn't in quite such abundance (i.e. at night or in Seattle). Batteries are highly inefficient and often times rely on materials that are, themselves, somewhat harmful to the environment.
The solution comes from a rather simple idea (from The New York Times):
The idea is to capture the sun’s heat. Heat, unlike electric current, is something that industry knows how to store cost-effectively. For example, a coffee thermos and a laptop computer’s battery store about the same amount of energy, said John S. O’Donnell, executive vice president of a company in the solar thermal business, Ausra. The thermos costs about $5 and the laptop battery $150, he said, and “that’s why solar thermal is going to be the dominant form.”
Solar thermal systems are built to gather heat from the sun, boil water into steam, spin a turbine and make power, as existing solar thermal power plants do — but not immediately. The heat would be stored for hours or even days, like water behind a dam.
A plant that could store its output could pick the time to sell the production based on expected price, as wheat farmers and cattle ranchers do. Ausra, of Palo Alto, Calif., is making components for plants to which thermal storage could be added, if the cost were justified by higher prices after sunset or for production that could be realistically promised even if the weather forecast was iffy. Ausra uses Fresnel lenses, which have a short focal length but focus light intensely, to heat miles of black-painted pipe with a fluid inside.
The picture up top is of a system in Spain. Dozens of mirrored panels reflect sunlight to a central tower that collects all the thermal energy and transfers it to a tank of molten salt below for storage. It looks like something out of a James Bond movie. Actually, that would make a pretty cool ending--diabolical villain trapped in the tower and burned alive by the the focused light of the sun.
2 comments:
... while the diabolical villain's accomplice gets thrown into the molten salt by some woman named Prickly La'bia.
'Cause you need something molten to hold all that thermal energy, and I don't think his fur would have been enough. Plus, I haven't incorporated poop into my posts in awhile.
Oh, and Prickly La'bia--you should submit that for the next 007 flick.
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