Solar thermal gathers steam
News.com’s Michael Kanellos has a piece looking at the growing interest in solar thermal projects that generate electricity on a utility scale. He begins by providing an update on the solar plant in Nevada that’s generating enough electricity for 15,000 homes using a system of 184,000 mirrors arranged in parabolic arrays that focus the sun’s energy to produce steam. That steam cranks a turbine that produces electricity. Many advocates of solar thermal — including Vinod Khosla — say it is the most economical way of producing electricity from the sun on a large scale and will become competitive with coal over the next two decades, possibly earlier.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
March 14th, 2007 at 8:34 am
http://www.shpegs.org is a Canadian originated open design project which is developing a concept to increase the output of traditional solar steam plants by extracting additional heat from the ambient air with a solar trough heat pump system. The intent is to design and build a prototype solar thermal power generation system that is feasible outside of arid locations.
The current design has the potential provide renewable base load electrical generation with seasonal thermal storage and clean water generation in a scalable system built from common materials.