Solar thermal power coming of age (NV)

[jpak]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11273749/

NEW YORK - People will soon cool their homes with power from the searing desert sun, according to companies investing in a little-used solar technology.

Deserts are becoming hot spots for solar thermal power in which futuristic troughs concentrate the sun’s rays and create steam to run power-producing turbines at power plants. It is a different technology than rooftop solar panels.

<snip>

Utah-based International Automated Systems Inc. on Thursday signed an agreement to install a $150 million, 100-megawatt power plant for Solar Renewable Energy in Nevada

And North Carolina-based Solargenix, in which Spanish building and services company Acciona SA is buying a 55 percent stake, will break ground over the weekend on a 64 MW, $100 million solar thermal plant called Nevada Solar One. The company said it will be the first U.S. commercial solar thermal plant, coming on line in 2007.

<more>

[gristy]

1. Mirrors, a boiler, and a steam turbine - makes sense to me!

And you can't get much lower-tech than that.

[WhiteTara]

2. Oh the future looks brighter

if only we could get rid of the *co and move into our birthright of living with nature instead of in spite of nature

[NMDemDist2]

3. they can build a solar power plant to come online in a year? then WTF

are they even talking about more Nuclear??

:banghead:

[drm604]

4. Probably because

solar thermal plants are only practical in certain parts of the country. They're a good (great!) part of an overall strategy but probably not the sole answer.

[megatherium]

6. Nuclear is good for baseline power generation

but solar is good for peak power generation; so they would complement each other.

[Dead_Parrot]

7. Because neonatal incubators need to run at night, too. nt

[eppur_se_muova]

13. That's what accumulators are for.

Hydropower reservoirs, flywheels, even H2 generation are all ways of storing energy from peak production times and releasing it when the supply/demand balance shifts the other way. Most power grids have some form of accumulation, regardless of where the energy comes from. This is not a factor that hasn't been considered, and solved (in various ways) before.

[Dead_Parrot]

15. Not strictly true

Grid storage to date has mainly been use to smooth the demand, rather than meet it, and capacity is woefully inadequate for storing the amount of power needed. Flywheels (along with SMES and batteries) can rapidly react to changes, but only for a few minutes while other sources are brought on line - they have very low capacity related to grid use. Pumped hydro is better, but there are only so many places they can be built: The combined output of every pumped hydro plant in the US would not power CA's grid, even at 3AM. There would need to be a hell of a lot of dams built if you wanted to go down that route.

Hydrogen storage is a possibility, although I wouldn't call it solved when no-one's tried it. I know Denmark are looking at it (they've hit a wall with wind power and need to address the storage issue), and a CAES-like system based on hydrogen might have possibilities.

As a sideline, there is also the generating capacity needed to store the power in the first place: if we assume a mix of storage solutions averaging 80% efficiency, CA would need to produce around 65GW during the day just to meet current demand - though the current 35GW capacity has a lot of spare. If you include personal transportation in that, you'll need to peak at closer to 300GW. (about the same as the current capacity for the entire US).

[jpak]

16. Norway is using a wind/hydrogen system to provide on-demand power

on Utsira Island...and Humboldt University has operated a PV/hydrogen system for many years.

[Dead_Parrot]

17. Utsira Island...

Shows some promise: IIRC There's a similar project being set up on the Orkneys (off Scotland) - Although something would need to be done about the US$300,000 per house per year price-tag. :)

The Humboldt stuff looks interesting, but if it averages 4.9 hours to produce 1 cubic metre of hydrogen it's a long way from a solution. I couldn't find the array specs, but it's not like it's a tiny system:



EDIT: Not the Orkneys, it's Unst in the Hebrides: They even manage to run a car off it: BBC article

[jpak]

18. Norsk Hydro has already built and tested MW-scale electrolyzers

that produce hundreds of cubic meters of H2 per hour...

http://www.bellona.no/en/energy/hydrogen/report_6-2002/22869.html

...and a 500 MW hydrogen power plant is being built in California....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x42393

The technology is already here...

[Dead_Parrot]

19. Very true...

Large-scale hydrogen production has been around for ages. But it's very energy hungry - the bellona article states 4.5 KWh per m3, and you only get 2.7 KWh back out of it, if your fuel cells are 100% efficient.

To refine the CA example slightly, to generate the 20GW baseload from 5 hours of sunshine you'd need to produce 96GW at peak (plus another 15GW or so for normal peak loading). That we can produce enough power from conventional sources - as in the two articles cited - is not surprising.

How long it would take us to gear renewables up to that scale probably wouldn't be surprising either, sadly.

[Oerdin]

11. You do realize...

That dispite all of the hype, all of the tax credits and subsidizes, that over all energy output by solar has declined in the US over the last 10 years, right? Demand for power just keeps going up and up.

Solar is a nitch application while nuclear and fossils fuels are the only real options for delivering massive amounts of power day in and day out.

[eppur_se_muova]

14. But in the long term...

I'm pretty sure we'll run out of oil and gas, and even coal, long before the sun runs out of protons.

[catmother]

5. kerry came up with this suggestion even before he decided to

run for president. it was one of the things i liked about him. i forget the actual measurements. but in was in square acres i believe. well anyway whatever the amount was it would have been enough to give power to the whole country. i know we have enough space in arizona to do this.

i many years ago -- i believe it was in florida -- they were running a hospital on solar power.

[IDemo]

8. Solar thermal vs. solar photovoltaic: sunset != darkness

I'm not sure if this applies to the technology utilized by "Nevada Solar One" or not, but solar-thermal solutions such as the SunDish allow for the fueling of their Stirling gensets after dark with any conventional fuel source, including natural gas or landfill methane. Solar power doesn't necessarily equal "daylight hours only", when a Stirling is part of the equation.

[Dead_Parrot]

9. Nice, but...

There is only so much gas in the world. Landfill will run quite a few of these plants overnight, but even the United States of Walmart doesn't have enough landfill gas to run the entire country.

[jpak]

12. Denmark and Canada are looking to produce hydrogen from wind power

to run combined-cycle gas turbines (for co-generation in DK).

One can envision two of these solar plants in NV - one producing electricity in the daytime and one producing hydrogen for nighttime production.

Endless energy...

[rfkrfk]

10. nothing to see here, move along to other threads or forums