I have had a quick scan thruough the thread & I can't see where anyone has discussed the current Solar Generation plans being under taken by the Australian Gov.
My company is currently involved in the design & possible construction of a solar generation power system in Qld.
Here is the web site for the project. http://www.solarflairproject.com.au/2010/
To put it simply;
It does not use PV panels, it uses concave mirrors to intensify the sun's heat onto a pipe which is carrying "oil". The high temp oil then heats water into steam which turns the turbine.
In addition there is an underground "tank" which contains a substance that is also heated by the hot oil via a heat exchange system. This substance stores the heat & then after the sun goes down the stored heat is used to keep heating the oil. The heat storage substance is able to continue heating the oil for another 3hrs after the sun is gone. Enough to generate through the evening peak period.
The design will produce 150mw from 1.5hrs after dawn through to 3hrs after sundown. The mirror array covers approx 30 hectares.
Great concept .... have read about this type of power generation.
On a lighter note ...... You better throw in a few pairs of Sunglasses if I'm going to live near by. Imagine the glare from a Solar Farm of Mirrors.
Hey...I'm not knocking it ..... it certainly has potential ... !
Last edited by FlashDrive; 17-03-2011 at 10:31 PM.
Reason: correction
Great concept .... have read about this type of power generation.
On a lighter note ...... You better throw in a few pairs of Sunglasses if I'm going to live near by. Imagine the glare from a Solar Farm of Mirrors.
Hey...I'm not knocking it ..... it certainly has potential ... !
Yep. That's why they put it in the middle of nowhere. Have a look at the location map on the web site. It's beside the existing Kogan Crk power stn. Half way between Dalby & Chinchilla.
THemain reason for it being so close to the existing pwr stn was for the ease of connecting into the grid.
Solar furnace technology has been around a while - it's simple and effective - low tech - easy to maintain.
Odd that it was left on the shelf from 1960 when it was first tested in Texas.IIRC
you don't need a CAD drafter with steam engineering experience do you???
This is a pilot Solar power station out in Windorah I saw in 2008
I don't know how far it has progressed or even if it is generating any electricity
One of the things that annoy's me is the insistence that every thing must be Big.
Why can't smaller centers have their own power stations,be they Solar,Wind or any other method of producing power
What we have is a country criss crossed with ugly Towers and power lines that cost millions to erect and are susceptible to every thing from sabotage to natural disasters
Keep the big power stations to the major centers and give the smaller centers their own power stations.
Cheers
No matter how our civilisation approaches the problem of power, one thing is for certain. Power will need to be generated from several sources to maintain 24 hour operation.
Personally I like solar and wind power but also see that nuclear is the next best viable solution. If CO2 is a real problem why are we still pouring tonnes and tonnes of the stuff into the atmosphere via coal powered plants? Surely if the effects of climate change (I am not an advocate of manmade climate change) are to worsen as suggested in the coming century then one or two nuclear disasters will seem like a pinic by comparison. We really need to look at the big picture here.
Solar power should be installed free to all homes with the carbon tax and power companies should once again be owned by the state. It was stupid to sell off assets to private companies. Power costs are now too much for many of the elderly, next it will be us.
Choice is yours but I will be going with solar very soon at least if nothing else to reduce our power bills.
No matter how our civilisation approaches the problem of power, one thing is for certain. Power will need to be generated from several sources to maintain 24 hour operation.
Personally I like solar and wind power but also see that nuclear is the next best viable solution. If CO2 is a real problem why are we still pouring tonnes and tonnes of the stuff into the atmosphere via coal powered plants? Surely if the effects of climate change (I am not an advocate of manmade climate change) are to worsen as suggested in the coming century then one or two nuclear disasters will seem like a pinic by comparison. We really need to look at the big picture here.
Solar power should be installed free to all homes with the carbon tax and power companies should once again be owned by the state. It was stupid to sell off assets to private companies. Power costs are now too much for many of the elderly, next it will be us.
Choice is yours but I will be going with solar very soon at least if nothing else to reduce our power bills.
The reason why.....the politics of greed (power, influence and money). In other words....the coal mining companies and the oil companies: Exxon, Caltex, BP, AGIP, Chevron, etc etc (notice who owns most of these companies), along with their government flunkies.
They really couldn't give a damn if this planet went to hell in a hand basket, just so long as they benefited from it they'd be happy.
Solar power free....that I totally agree with and it should be implemented as soon as it can possibly be done.
Solar power free....that I totally agree with and it should be implemented as soon as it can possibly be done.
The technology is currently in a rapid development phase - I think wide scale implementation should be held off until it becomes more commercially competitive. I think governments waste far too much money on grand schemes then try to claw it back from impotant government services. For example, money was splashed around for shiny new school buildings, yet budgets are being tightened in support services that help kids with behavioural problems, autism, etc.
the biggest being that it can't deliver anywhere near the power/performance levels required to meet current day demands !
so many people seem overly negative about solar power, whether solar panel or concentrating solar power programs, and I just wonder where their info comes from.
however, it seems that even the department of energy in the US thinks that solar has a big future as a major contributor to the US' power, if not the major source of its power.
i have been reading quite a bit from there, both the website itself and papers it references or internal papers available to the public. They go into detail on everything from the costs (not just of the panels, etc. but of the attendant components), maintenance costs, grants (US-based, obviously), power output, etc.
mostly, it seems a bright future (excuse the pun) in the US and it seems sad that Australia, with its obvious benefits, are seemingly behind the times.
If we can get a man on the moon, perform brain surgery and cure disease then it seems to me that the implementation of solar power in large-scale ways seems trivial.
j
If we can get a man on the moon, perform brain surgery and cure disease then it seems to me that the implementation of solar power in large-scale ways seems trivial.
This is all fine..
But the bottom line will be the price of generated kWh by particular method.
The cheapest (or most economical) option will prevail.
As long as kWh generated by coal is cheaper, we will have coal power plants.
If/when the solar generated kWh becomes comparable in price with coal (or hydro) it will become an option.
so many people seem overly negative about solar power, whether solar panel or concentrating solar power programs, and I just wonder where their info comes from.
however, it seems that even the department of energy in the US thinks that solar has a big future as a major contributor to the US' power, if not the major source of its power.
i have been reading quite a bit from there, both the website itself and papers it references or internal papers available to the public. They go into detail on everything from the costs (not just of the panels, etc. but of the attendant components), maintenance costs, grants (US-based, obviously), power output, etc.
mostly, it seems a bright future (excuse the pun) in the US and it seems sad that Australia, with its obvious benefits, are seemingly behind the times.
If we can get a man on the moon, perform brain surgery and cure disease then it seems to me that the implementation of solar power in large-scale ways seems trivial.
If it was so good and simple to implement, then why hasn't all this technology been put to use?? Because all the talk isn't as good as the reality. Much of the technology upon which many of these studies are based is still experimental and far from being a commercial proposition, despite the picture sites like this present. You have to be careful about gleaning information from sites like this, especially government sites, because many of them in the US are promotional and funding "request" sites. That's not to say all the stuff here is bogus (it's not) but many sites turn out be more than just information sites. They're saying "hey, look what we're doing, give us more money".
The same dept' a few years back calculated that to power the whole of the US with solar technology, it would require a field of panels 1.5 times the size of Texas!!!. I doubt that sort of project would ever be approved. In Oz terms, it's a field of panels 45% the size of Queensland!!!!. The conservationist/environmentalists would have a field day with that!!!. That's with present best practice technology. Now, future developments will most likely see that size reduced by a factor of 3 or so, but that's still a huge area of panel. Even if you could supply very cheap panels for every home and building in the country, you'd still need a vast amount of panel to power everything else. Plus, the US doesn't receive as much sunlight as we do here in Oz, for any given year, so their panels per user in many parts of the country would have to be even more efficient than what they'd have to be here.
Powering a country like Oz solely on solar power would be difficult enough with present technology, the US would be totally impractical, if not impossible.
However, it could be done, but it would cost a vast amount of money and society would have to make quite a few changes. Much of the change would be resisted, especially by local councils and by private consumers.
As long as kWh generated by coal is cheaper, we will have coal power plants.
quite possibly, although i would be interested to see what the true cost of coal is without subsidies. This is based upon the assumption that teh coal industry receives subsidies, which seems to be widely reported but ignored. so, let's make it a level playing field, at least.
Quote:
Originally Posted by renormalised
You have to be careful about gleaning information from sites like this, especially government sites, because many of them in the US are promotional and funding "request" sites.
yes, i understand that you must be careful about what you read and consider the source. which is exactly what I was trying to suggest by my post. I suspectthat the reality is somewhere in between the naysayers and the proslytisers.
as for the comment about changes in the amount of available land and costs required- well, that is taken into account in some of those documents, as suggested by changes in efficiency, cost of the associated compentry (one comment was that most of the cost savings will come from the associated components and not the panels themselves).
society making changes? well, of course, which is why I hold out no hope for solar to become a reality regardless of my belief that it shoudlbe the furture and if investment was made to the same tune as the other industries then we would probably get there. further, it woudl be interesting to knwo how much investment has been made into nuclear research to get us to where we are today.
Why not make a real effort, and just like nuclear and coal, increase it as improvements are made.
in the case of Japan, and working from someone's comment that 60% ballarat's (or bendigo's) power was for street lights, could you imagine how mcuh energy wouldl be saved daily (or nightly) if Japan turned off a lot of their street and shop signs!
The same dept' a few years back calculated that to power the whole of the US with solar technology, it would require a field of panels 1.5 times the size of Texas!!!. I doubt that sort of project would ever be approved. In Oz terms, it's a field of panels 45% the size of Queensland!!!!.
Those numbers look way off.
Looking at USA's electricity consumption and using bojans figures from earlier on in this thread, you can work out that 800 solar farms as calculated by bojan (the equivalent of 800 average nuclear reactors) would supply that amount of energy, which covers an area 40km x 40km (1600 km2). The size of Texas is 696,241 km2
The site you reference would seem to have all the answers .. so they must also have all the funding. So research funding IS available. The next time I hear that Solar is not receiving research funding, I'll reference this site).
According to their mission statement:
Quote:
DOE's goals include increasing the use of CSP in the United States, making CSP competitive in the intermediate power market by 2015, and developing advanced technologies that will reduce systems and storage costs, enabling CSP to be competitive in the baseload power market by 2020.
We should wait for the outcomes, wait for their technologies to mature, and then pounce on it all.
I'd say that would be about … what .. about 15 years before its all working well enough to make it a winner in Oz ??
Why do we have to do anything on Solar in the meanwhile ?
Anything we spend on it now, will probably be redundant and superseded by the time its all ready to be cost effective ..
The site you reference would seem to have all the answers .. so they must also have all the funding. So research funding IS available. The next time I hear that Solar is not receiving research funding, I'll reference this site).
Quote:
We should wait for the outcomes, wait for their technologies to mature, and then pounce on it all.
yep, that's the way to ensure that when we cannot dig stuff out of the ground and sell it anymore we won't have anything else to sell.
perhaps we should disclose if we have any shares or financial interest in any coal, uranium or solar comapnies.
I used to drive a 5.8 litre V8 and at home have the heater and airconditioner on FULL comfort. Those days are gone!
We all just need to cut back.
I honestly do not care for myself as the fan will be hit after I die.
My daughter and grandaughter will not be in this position.
If the argument is about cost it is because the polluters US and the UTILITIES never took into account the cost to our environment.
I have heard all the pathetic arguments from the AGW deniers. According to them I can just throw my rubbish on the street and piss and crap there as well as I am only a tiny percentage of polluters. Honestly it makes no difference!
We all just need to cut back.
I honestly do not care for myself as the fan will be hit after I die.
.
.
.
According to them I can just throw my rubbish on the street and piss and crap there as well as I am only a tiny percentage of polluters. Honestly it makes no difference!
Bert
i agree. since I have no kids it will not affect me in the long run. i could probably take 10 minute showers, too! still, i have friends with children so I do think I shoudl think about them.
whilst I have taken a big part in this thread and am firmly in favour of less damaging power sources (immediate and future damage) I have pretty much decided that nothing will come of it until we have either run out of coal and uranium or polluted the earth so much that everyone needs to wear a mask or lead pants!
Looking at USA's electricity consumption and using bojans figures from earlier on in this thread, you can work out that 800 solar farms as calculated by bojan (the equivalent of 800 average nuclear reactors) would supply that amount of energy, which covers an area 40km x 40km (1600 km2). The size of Texas is 696,241 km2
That's given 100% optimum figures, as per Bojan's post (and then only around high noon...so +- 1hour/day). That's also dependent on the full 1370W/M^2 being available all the time with solar cells at 10-20% efficiency collecting the sunlight. It's also dependent on a reliable 24/7, 365 days/year supply and storage. Plus it's also dependent on how much electricity is being consumed, not on the generating capacity, which what we're talking about.
In any case 800 average nuke reactors (600MW generating capacity) is only 480GW of capacity....the US generates 1030GW annually (or 4100TWH), so your calculations are out by at least a factor of 2.5 or more. For an ideal situation.
But being beside the point, those figures weren't mine, they were from the DoE in the US. So if they stuffed up, that's their fault.
i agree. since I have no kids it will not affect me in the long run. i could probably take 10 minute showers, too! still, i have friends with children so I do think I shoudl think about them.
whilst I have taken a big part in this thread and am firmly in favour of less damaging power sources (immediate and future damage) I have pretty much decided that nothing will come of it until we have either run out of coal and uranium or polluted the earth so much that everyone needs to wear a mask or lead pants!
Heavy and poisonous!!!
Uncomfortable as well and a nuisance to wash and iron
