The Oil Drum

There were a couple of small Australian solar power projects that I left out of my look at solar thermal power a little while ago, as I thought they were worthy of separate consideration.

I talked about one of these - Wizard Power's technique for storing energy using ammonia - last week. The other project is by a company called Acquasol which is building a plant to desalinate water using solar thermal energy at Point Paterson, near Port Augusta in South Australia.

Like Wizard Power and Lloyd Energy's graphite based energy storage technique, Acquasol received an initial round of funding from the (now defunct) Australian Greenhouse Office's Advanced Energy Storage Technology program.

In this post I'll look at the Acquasol project and then more generally at water scarcity worldwide and some of the approaches being taken to tackle it.

There were a couple of small Australian solar power projects that I left out of my look at solar thermal power a little while ago, as I thought they were worthy of separate consideration.

The first of these is being put together by a South Australian company called Wizard Power, which is trying to commercialise research from the Australian National University (ANU) - a solar concentrator dish and a closed loop thermochemical energy storage system using ammonia.

While we spend a lot of time talking about traditional energy sources based on depleting resources that are extracted from the ground, I think its important to remember that the fastest growing sources of energy are solar and wind, and that these will never run out. As M King Hubbert put it regarding solar power in particular :

The biggest source of energy on this earth, now or ever, is solar. I used to think it was so diffuse as to be impractical. But I’ve changed my mind. It’s not impractical…This technology exists right now. So if we just convert the technology and research and facilities of the oil and gas industries, the chemical industry and the electrical power industry—we could do it tomorrow. All we’ve got to do is throw our weight into it.

Both Stuart Staniford's recent "Powering Civilization to 2050" post and (to a lesser extent) Scientific American's "Solar Grand Plan" concentrated on using photovoltaic solar cells to provide the bulk of our energy needs. While both thin film and traditional silicon based PV cells seem to set new efficiency records every couple of months (a CIGS cell recently reached 19.9% efficiency in lab tests, and multi-crystalline silicon PV cells recently reached 19.5% efficiency), the most promising mechanism for large scale solar power generation seems to be solar thermal power (often referred to as concentrating solar power, or CSP).

This is a guest article by Gerry Wolff, coordinator of TREC-UK. 'TREC' stands for the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation, their website is at www.trecers.net. These webisites are a fantastic source of informaion on concentrating solar power.

Dish/engine systems from Solar Systems at Umuwa, South Australia