Stories tagged with "solar thermal power"

Work starts on Whyalla solar project

Posted by Big Gav on August 13, 2009 - 8:10am in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: australia, energy storage, solar power, solar thermal power, wizard energy [list all tags]

The ABC has a report on progress towards building a solar thermal power plant in South Australia (covered previously here in We're Off To See The Wizard - Storing Energy Using Ammonia) - Work starts on Whyalla solar project.

The foundations are being laid for a $15 million solar plant at Whyalla. A demonstration plant of four big dishes will combine solar power with ammonia energy storage technology.

Whyalla's deputy mayor Eddie Hughes says it is great to see something tangible after nearly 13 years of planning. "The first pad is to form a working base for the construction of the dishes," he said.

Mr Hughes says the 500-square-metre dishes will be the largest in the world. "They're going to be quite spectacular, I think they will attract a lot of attention," he said. "These are the largest solar dishes in the world, capable of generating temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees."

He denies the plant will create another industrial eyesore for Whyalla. "Oh, I think they're going to be exceptionally beautiful to look at," he said.

Mr Hughes says, if the demonstration plant can successfully provide base load power, a 600-dish plant will be considered, at a likely cost of $350 million. It would be able to provide power to 19,000 homes.

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Australia to build world's largest solar energy plant: PM

Posted by Big Gav on May 18, 2009 - 6:58am in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: australia, concentrating solar power, solar power, solar thermal power [list all tags]

Sorry for my increasingly rare presence here of late - I've become overly busy at work (so much for my 4 day week, which didn't last long), and my personal life has had a few complications to manage as well.

Given that solar thermal power is pretty much my favourite form of renewable energy and the one I consider to make the greatest contribution to our energy needs in the long term, I can't let the weekend's announcement by PM Rudd about a plan to build a 1 GW power plant go past unnoticed.

Reuters reports the new solar power plant is part of efforts to achieve the new 20% mandatory renewable energy target - Australia to build world's largest solar energy plant: PM. More at Bloomberg.

Australia plans to build the world's largest solar power station with an output of 1000 megawatts in a A$1.4 billion (US$1.05 billion) investment, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Sunday. The plant would have three times the generating capacity of the current biggest solar-powered electricity plant, which is in California, Rudd said during a tour of a power station.

Tender details will be announced later in the year, and successful bidders will be named in the first half of 2010. Rudd said the project was aimed at exploiting the country's ample sunshine, which he called "Australia's biggest natural resource." It was also aimed at helping the country become a leader in renewable, clean energy, he said. ...

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Solving Our Water Problems - Desalination Using Solar Thermal Power

Posted by Big Gav on May 2, 2008 - 3:00pm in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: acquasol, australia, concentrating solar power, desalination, solar thermal power, stephen schneider, water [list all tags]

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.

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We're Off To See The Wizard - Storing Energy Using Ammonia

Posted by Big Gav on April 29, 2008 - 6:01pm in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: ammonia, australia, concentrating solar power, energy storage, solar thermal power, wizard power [list all tags]

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.

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Concentrating On The Important Things - Solar Thermal Power

Posted by Big Gav on April 2, 2008 - 6:00pm in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: concentrating solar power, solar hot water, solar power, solar thermal power [list all tags]

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).

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