Category: Solar Thermal
Solar Thermal Deserves Our Support
| May 13, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Solar Thermal |
Here’s a good article on a recently completed solar thermal tower (aka concentrated solar power or CSP) in the desert between Las Vegas and Reno, NV.
The thing to like about solar thermal, as we’ve often discussed here, is that it affords us a fairly low-cost way of storing energy and delivering it when the sun isn’t shining. This is due to the fact that in today’s world, we can store heat energy (in vats of molten salt) far less expensively than we can store electrical energy (in batteries). Thus solar thermal installations can be treated as baseload, delivering power on a consistent 24X7 basis.
That’s the good news. Read More
From Guest Blogger Brian McGowan: Solar Cooking — Because I Can
| May 13, 2012 | Posted by Brian McGowan under Solar Thermal |
For amusement only….
Today I cooked mashed potatoes in my solar oven. The oven is made of one of those shiny windshield shades, a rack from an old countertop oven, a very large clear plastic pretzel container and a 2lb 13oz Prego spagetti sauce jar which I painted black with high temperature paint except for a stripe I left so I could look at what was going on in there. I peeled and cut potatoes to fill the jar and added water and put the arrangement out in the sun around 12:30. About 6:30 I retrieved the arrangement and brought the jar in to see what I had.
Solar Thermal Comes To Namibia
| May 10, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Solar Thermal |
Here’s an interview with 2GreenEnergy Associate Agostinho Miguel Garcia, who’s working on a very interesting solar thermal (concentrated solar power / CSP) project in Namibia – a country whose conditions are perfect for CSP.
Agostinho’s headquartered in Lisbon, but works all over the Eastern Hemisphere. Great guy.
In response to my congratulatory email, Agostinho writes: ”Thank you! This is very important for Namibia. I hope this brings them on the CSP map.”
I hope so too.
How Much Solar Thermal Would Be Required to Provide 100% of Our Energy Needs?
| April 20, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Solar Thermal |
I’ve often written about how astonishingly little of the Earth’s surface needs to be covered in a solar collecting technology, e.g., solar thermal, in order to provide 100% of the world’s energy needs. Linked above is a wonderful graphic that makes this clear.
Don’t get me wrong: the task of deploying that much solar thermal is not something that we can do overnight, but it sure provides something to think about. We receive 6000 times more energy from the sun every day than we need to supply all our energy needs. It sure seems a shame that we can’t come up with a way of making this happen, and that, as a consequence, we keep depleting our ever-shrinking supply of fossil fuels, while destroying our natural environment.
Infographic on Solar Energy
| March 6, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Solar Thermal |
Here’s another in our ongoing series of infographics, designed to offer young people and clean energy newcomers an accessible introduction to the subject. Here, we provide an objective look at the “pros and cons” of solar.
While we advocate in favor of solar generally, we believe that it’s best to arm people with the unvarnished facts, one of which is “there is no such thing as a free lunch,” i.e., all forms of energy generation come with certain costs and other downsides. It’s by understanding the totality of these facts that one becomes able to have a meaningful, informed, and relevant discussion on the subject.
Clean Energy Technology Is Developed in Mysterious Ways
| March 3, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Solar Thermal |
It’s the birthday of Alexander Graham Bell, whose telephone came as the accidental consequence of his interest in developing a tool that might teach deaf people how to speak. To me, it’s another reminder that accidental discoveries are extremely common. My friend Wally Rippel discussed this with me last time we got together.
When Sputnik was launched, we were thinking about bombs and spy satellites. Now, the applications are hurricane observation and navigational systems. Read More
Infographics: The Pros and Cons of Solar Energy
| March 1, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Solar Thermal |
We’re working up another in our series of infographics, in our quest to lay out some of the basics of renewable energy for people who may be new to the subject. Here’s the text that I propose to use for a piece called “The Pros and Cons of Solar Energy,” which I posted on Renewable Energy World.com the other day.
The ROI on Solar Thermal – aka Concentrated Solar Power
| November 5, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Solar Thermal |
I wrote recently that it’s impossible to predict the ROI associated with solar thermal (aka concentrated solar power or CSP).
What I was referring to was utility-scale CSP. Personally, I think the future will hold significant reductions in costs and improvements in effectiveness, making this technology quite workable at the multi-megawatt scale. It’s certainly not there now, but we need to keep in mind that it’s a fairly new technology, whose R&D lags PV and wind by several decades.
So what’s the ROI? Read More
What’s the Return on Investment on Solar Thermal?
| November 3, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Solar Thermal |
I just received this terse question from a reader: “What’s the ROI (return on investment) on solar thermal?”
I responded, hoping to prompt more discussion: “That’s an interesting but impossible question to answer. What is the nature of your interest in the subject, if I may ask?”
I post this brief conversation because it’s indicative of two much larger and incredibly important issues:
1) Computing the ROI for investors in new technologies like these is impossible, as no one can pick the winners from the losers at this point. Personally, I’m betting on solar thermal, and, though many agree, there are far greater minds than mine that don’t see it this way.
2) Not to get too flippant, but what’s the ROI on saving our civilization from destruction? According to Lester Brown, whom the Washington Post calls “one of the world’s most influential thinkers,”
Ice is melting so fast that even climate scientists are scrambling to keep up with the shrinkage of ice sheets and glaciers. The melting of the earth’s largest ice sheets—Greenland and West Antarctica—would raise sea level dramatically. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would raise sea level 23 feet. Melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, the most vulnerable portion of the Antarctic ice because of its exposure to both warming air and warming ocean water, would eventually raise sea level 16 feet. Many of the world’s coastal cities would be under water; over 600 million coastal dwellers would be forced to move.
Solar thermal holds the single greatest promise of clean, abundant, inexpensive energy — in the absence of which mankind will be unable to make its way across these next critical 50 years.
I’m sure this latter point was not contemplated in the reader’s question, but some folks may find it worth considering.
Clean Energy — Lots of Ideas Out There
| September 21, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Solar Thermal |
“The way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas,” two-time Nobel prize laureate Linus Pauling said modestly. That’s something to think about, isn’t it? Don’t stress out about the quality of your ideas – at least initially. Let them come to you.
But I have to chuckle about some of the ideas I come across that are purported to contribute meaningfully to the supply of renewable energy. Here’s the content of a call I had with a young man in Florida the other day – and I had actually heard this exact concept a few months earlier from another gentleman – equally as earnest: harness the energy that flows out of the vents in your attic. “It’s a form of solar energy, in which the sun heats that air. My invention uses a generator to turn that energy into electricity.”
At least this isn’t theoretically impossible. In fact, as I explain, “There is no doubt that you will be able to generate electricity. But how much? We’ve all seen attic vents like this one. How much power do you think is being dissipated on the hottest afternoon in the summer? I’m guessing it’s a few watts.
I can tell by the reaction I hear on the other end of the phone that these people write me off as a nay-sayer, blind to a great idea – a fool who wouldn’t know a breakthrough idea if it slapped him across the face.
“Look, do this, before you spend money in patents, marketing, etc.,” I suggest. “Take this idea to your local high school physics teacher and discuss it. If you’re still excited about it after that talk, please call me back.”
The phone isn’t ringing.
