Gallery, Projects and General > Neat Stuff
Solar power
rleete:
Anyone happen to read about the joint venture company in San Diego that's making solar panels? They've got a contract to make a "power plant" of solar trackers that will generate 100megawatts. BTW, current total solar power generation is estimated to be just over 100megawatts, so this is big.
The grand opening of the plant in San Diego was this week. Soitec US is officially online. This is the company Orafol (formerly Reflexite, where I work) has partnered with to produce solar panels for power generation.
Those big panels, with the array of lenses? I designed all the tooling and fixturing to produce them. I will be directly responsible for the first large scale (100megawatt) solar power plant in the USA
http://www.sandiego6.com/news/local/New-Solar-Facility-Looking-to-Hire-450-184127991.html
Watch the video!
(Edited to fix broken link)
dsquire:
rleete
Let me be the first to congratulate you. It sure sounds like a very ambitious project and I wish you well as it goes forward.
I couldn't find the link to the video. Maybe you could tell us where it is hiding.
Cheers :beer:
Don
andyf:
It must be great to be involved with a project like that! And, looking out of my window at the miserable weather here in the UK, I envy your being in a part of the world with enough reliable sunshine to make it work!
I hope the project goes really well.
Don, I found the video:
http://www.sandiego6.com/news/local/New-Solar-Facility-Looking-to-Hire-450-184127991.html
Andy
rleete:
Thanks, Don. Sorry about the link, in cutting & pasting it somehow got unformatted.
Andy, many thanks for fixing the link.
Lew_Merrick_PE:
100 MW = 100,000 m²/.28 (the current crop of PV converters is 28% efficient at best) = 357,143 m² of collectors as the average tropical solar flux is 1 kW/m². If you can use steam generation, then you can increase the efficiency into the 40% range using the best of modern steam technology. On the other hand, getting into Near Earth Orbit (NEO) increases the solar flux input into the 1.5 MW/m² range and going out beyond the Earth's magnetosphere pushes that up closer to 14 MW/m².
I have been working (from time-to-time) with solar (and other alternative) energy systems since the early-1970's. There were programs on using particle beams to transmit energy (Chair Heritage, GRASER, and, later, SDI) that were demonstrated as part of SkyLab that everybody has forgotten about. We actually (1976) achieved 5 MW of transmission in a ø6 inch (ø100 mm) beam that was publicly acknowledged (in Popular Science). I have heard (but have no documentation for) claims made of reaching close to 12 MW in a ø6 inch beam from the late-1980's.
One of my local engineering/design services customers produces PV solar arrays. They get (at best) 115-130 W/m² of output with a 1 kW/m² of input. Without (Swedish, UK, & US) government funding, they could not afford to "play" in this market. The well-publicized Solyndra debacle of recent memory was founded in an unrealistic assumption of solar energy. I really hope that Soitec succeeds, but each failure of subsidized R&D ventures presented as commercially viable operations hurts the needed ongoing public R&D projects that have the chance to lead to commercially viable products.
One of the technologies that has led to the multiplication of new (medical) drugs was an improvement in the mixing (technically: agglomerization) of their components. I was intimately involved in the development of this technology. It is really a rather simple improvement over the previous drug component mixing technology. However, it still took more than 20 years of taxpayer supported R&D to take this system from original concept to commercially viable application!
Automotive airbag restraint systems (another technology with which I was intimately involved in developing) took 25 years of taxpayer funded development before the first unit was installed in a mass-produced vehicle -- and that only happened when laws were instituted assuring that no liability could be placed on those who made or installed such devices. It took another 15 years of taxpayer funded development before they reached the level of safety & reliability you see today.
The US government started investing (somewhat) regularly in Earth-based solar power R&D in 1979. Such funding has gone in fits until the last few years. (My personal guess is that we have "invested" in this technology for 10 of the past 33 years in a realistic fashion.) Just as the post-Sputnik rush to space nearly destroyed our ability to launch useful payloads into orbit, so a premature rush to commercialize Earth-based solar energy production can damage efforts to make this technology truly practicable -- and that will be a very high price to pay...
And I still ask, where should we be "drilling" this well?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version