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[OH the sceptics...This is quite normal for the knockers, so i have provided it here for anyone that has said its not feasible to use solar power...]
The concept excites engineers but Davey is realistic about the scepticism he will encounter in Australia. One senior executive in the wind-power sector recently dismissed the solar thermal tower as “just a chimney”, claiming it won’t work. Davey proffers a photograph of the Manzanares plant and says simply: “He should do his homework.”
[Yes it wont work here cause its not spain...lol...]
Already, a chill wind is swirling around the huge wind turbines that have sprung up on the Victorian coast. Last week, the Victorian chairman of the National Trust, Randall Bell, called for a moratorium on their construction until the state develops a master plan for the energy industry.
“We might go down this track and find it’s a no-through road and suddenly we find our landscape, and our coastline, littered with this sort of technology that we might all agree is a blight on our landscape. But we’ll be stuck with it for 50, maybe even 100 years,” Bell says.
[I like this comment, maybe those big nuclear power station chimneys look better than a solar tower...well i spose they do have a figure and not just straight up...]
At 500m apart, an array of 1MW wind turbines would need to be built more than two-deep along the 3000km length of Victoria’s coastline to replace Victoria’s current 7672MW generation capacity.
A 1km solar tower would be far more conspicuous but the corresponding “footprint” of 40-odd towers would be less than 800 sq km; about 28km on a side. And residents of the sparsely populated Millewa region around Neds Corner, with its flat vistas of wheat farms, limestone plains and low sand dunes, might welcome some vertical relief.
[i wonder, if my memory serves me right, these towers should create thermals...any glider pilots here, let me know if this is correct...these towers may create some large thermals that could be used by birds and gliders to do some nice flying....
Anyway back to reality, i havent found any costings for these but they do say that they will recover the costs to the environment for construction, within 2 1/2 years....]
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