Solucar/Abengoa, DU, and thermal solar

[Dogmudgeon]

The story about the Solucar/Abengoa thermal solar plant in Seville, Spain, has been posted here at DU about nineteen times, with half of them posted on this forum.


¡Hay caramba! ¡Hace mucho calor, Bebe!

It's a damn shame.

No, it doesn't bother me, not in the least. Being one of the pro-nuclearists, some people expect me to trash all other forms of energy, though I am quite supportive of solar thermal energy. I believe that it has far more potential than wind energy, and can be effectively developed on a low-tech community scale more easily than most renewable sources.

So why do I say it's a shame? Simple -- the Solucar/Abengoa plant is one of the very few, and the only European, solar thermal installation in the world. In addition, it generates 11 MW of energy, compared to about 500 MW for the average-sized coal-fired (and filthy) plant, and a full GW (1000 WM) for modern nuclear reactor power plants.

In comparison, the "big" wind energy generators typically produce a megawatt -- 200 feet off the ground, at peak power. But wind energy generators are usually clustered in farms of ten, fifty, a hundred or more of these nuevo windmills.

Solucar/Abengoa plans to increase the power of its Seville solar plant by as much as a factor of 100, which would put it in the big leagues. Even so, it is proof-of-concept and not a production model.

What is needed? Even more than production scale solar thermal generators on a gigawatt scale, Solucar/Abengoa and its competitors would do well to develop inexpensive small-sized installations that can be conveniently built by communities, even poor ones. A solar thermal system really only needs mirrors, a collector, a turbine-based generator, and plumbing. Fancier systems using exotic working fluids, battery banks, heliostatic control for the mirrors, etc., are all helpful and still would not necessarily turn the project into rocket science.

Most of our focus is currently on solar PV, probably because the big semiconductor companies are behind those efforts. And bravo! for that. But most of the solar power news I've seen in the past couple of years has been over "breakthroughs" that aren't. Last spring, high-efficiency PV cells were being manufactured from magnesium oxide -- Milk of Magnesia! I'm sure there was more to it than that, but as usual, the story quickly faded into obscurity. PV still has a long way to go before it becomes the common solution no energy production, and we still have parallel problems in energy storage, waste disposal, and corporate power to deal with for ALL power generation plans.

Engineers, especially those still in college, could develop standardized plans -- using common, off-the-shelf materials -- for small-scale ST power generators. It could be an ideal extension of the Open Source concept (already quite popular in Spain) to power generation. And such additional power capacity could be very inexpensive to build, making the price of real estate the major cost for a small installation.

This would move solar power out of the realm of being an expensive hobby. Even among hobbyists, solar thermal takes second place to photovoltaic electrical power. I am an electronics hobbyist myself, but I can not recall reading even one project article about building a backyard (or tabletop) solar-powered steam engine, although project plans for candle- or Sterno-powered Stirling engines are quite common. Most individual solar thermal development (and solar development, period), as we have seen, is for swimming-pool heating. It's good to take the old cee-ment pond off the grid, but it hardly addresses the problem of maintaining essential power production.

For quick prototyping and implementation, I believe that solar thermal will offer the fastest implementation and return at the lowest level of the power grid. For many areas in the South, where the average wind speed is "eh" but the sun shines brutally enough to turn a field worker's neck red, cheap solar could fulfill the unfinished mission of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

For long-term, primary, stable power production, I still strongly support nuclear power. But we're going to need some form of survival energy for the years during which environmental "activist" law firms keep nuclear development stalled in the courts, erroneously thinking that they're "sticking it to The Man". And almost any degree of grid independence is healthy in a large-scale energy mix.

Perhaps I am wrong about all this. But it seems to me that it's time to recycle some of our old plumbing and car alternators to extract a little electricity from our junk. And perhaps it's time that DUers took a closer look at solar energy's less-sexy cousin, solar thermal energy.

Criticisms? Comments?

--p!

[lapfog_1]

1. Actually, under grants by the NREL

there are a number of small and now large scale solar thermal projects... UNLV and ASU both have projects...

http://www.stirlingenergy.com/whatisastirlingengine.htm

and

http://www.redrok.com/up980301.htm

and

http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~khirata/academic/kiriki/solar/index.html

I can't find the web page anymore, but there was a great solar stirling engine science project (appropriate for, say, 6th graders) that one could build with empty soda cans and some tubing, etc.
Well, now as I recall, there was some construction hurdles, make that 8th or 9th graders.

Plus there was a dandy study done on using solar heating and some very special material developed by DOE to generate hydrogen gas from water using High Temperature Electrolysis (much less energy required to split steam atoms into hydrogen and oxygen).

[jpak]

2. A 150+ MW solar thermal plant has been operating in California for over a decade

Kramer Junction...

http://www.solel.com/products/pgeneration/ls2/kramerjunction/

It was preceded by a 10 MW solar power tower project (Solar 1/2)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert

Nevada's Desert 1 (64 MW) is under construction...

http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/partner/story;jsessionid=F8C005D693AE6788D13DA3A2B1074A22?id=38720

A 300-900 MW solar Stirling is in development too...

http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=35263

and a 1 MW station in Arizona...

http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=44696

Things *are* happening in this department...

:)

[hunter]

3. It was totally cool to stand among the mirrors on Solar One when it was running.

The black tower was too bright to look at. When the mirrors were focussed off the tower, it made a very bright spot hoovering in the air, which was the illumination of small otherwise invisible particles.

For such a small power plant it had a control room that looked like something from a science fiction movie, with big viewing windows and fancy displays. Visitors found it very impressive, which is probably why they set it up that way. Looky here, Mr. Politicion! Oooooooooooooh! Ahhhhhhhhh! Solar Power! (The control system of a gas plant with a similar capacity is utterly mundane.)

The Navy was also doing some experiments with higher temperature concentrating solar collectors at about the same time, using solar energy and ceramic catalysts to make synthetic fuels. If I recall correctly, one system piped methane and water to the focal point of a big parabolic mirror to make carbon monoxide and hydrogen which was then used to make synthetic fuels in an exothermic reaction that produced electricity as a byproduct.

Essentially all the carbon from the natural gas made it's way into the fuel, as opposed to non-solar processes which dump a lot of carbon dioxide as waste in addition to the carbon in the fuels. One advantage of this system was that off-the-shelf low temp piping could be used to link multiple collectors to one central power/synthesis plant.

This is one of the things I find so frustrating about all these projects, they are the same sorts of thing that were out there twenty five years ago when I used to be so excited by all this stuff, and not a whole lot has changed.

Meanwhile a place like Diablo Canyon has produced a huge amount of electricity, while solar power keeps piddling along, ever hopeful of being a significant energy source. I remember when the ARCO Solar plant on the Carrizo Plain was all shiny and new (I have a funny, very off-color story about that... but nevermind...) It came to a rather inglorious end:



http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/CA4965

The panels were dispersed as surplus, I wonder how much power they are generating these days...

[Dogmudgeon]

4. I don't understand why solar thermal never took off

Even using very low-tech methods and cheap materials, it solar heat can send boiling water through a turbine. If the installation is inexpensive enough, the lower relative efficiency of solar energy is a non-problem. And hobbyist-scale solar thermal turbine-generated electricity is even less of a challenge than souping up a car.

Perhaps it's just a matter of publicizing it. The main reason why many of these "secondary" methods of power generation are ignored is because nobody wants to take that first meager risk. And we certainly don't need to insist on something as big as Abengoa/Solucar. A $500 DIY kit that produces 10 kWh on the average sunny day would make enough "extra" electricity for a household to pay for itself in 1-5 years in most places. A 500 kWh unit in a poor community could produce significant utility-bill relief for the residents and provide three or four semi-skilled or skilled jobs.

These kinds of projects might be worth pitching to college students and young engineers. No exotica would be necessary, just a lot of hands-on work and know-how -- the kind of things lots of engineers love.

We don't usually think of engineers as change agents, but maybe it's time that we did.

--p!

[eppur_se_muova]

6. "We don't usually think of engineers as change agents"?!? The Hell you say!!

Seriously, that just about left me breathless.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. Well, we don't, and we should

Engineers get too little credit for the building of not just our machines, but of our very culture.

And I was using the editorial "we". "We" worship the athlete, the tycoon, the entertainer, and even the physician, but too often overlook the engineer.

Yes, indeed, it is time that we corrected that negligence. And at what better time than now?

--p!

[eppur_se_muova]

8. "We" must read different books from what "I" do.

But, hey, I've even read some of Henry Petrovski's books, so I'm not representative.

[Dogmudgeon]

9. And the reason you are in a snit is ... ?

:wtf:

You sound quite indignant.

Is it because you think I offended engineers (I did not), that I didn't offend engineers (guilty), that I used language you don't approve of, or that I didn't also point out that engineers designed the Titanic and polyester?

Care to let me in on the secret?

--p!

[eppur_se_muova]

10. Indignant? Snit? No, just astonished.

Considering how popular stories about the Brooklyn Bridge, Panama Canal, etc. are, and just how often even the "man in the street" expresses his amazement at the progress of computers, the Internet, space probes, and all kinds of other engineering achievements, I find it a little hard to believe that people wouldn't at some point notice that engineers have done quite a lot to change their lives.

Of course, if your original post meant to suggest that many people don't take the obvious step of drawing that conclusion, but just assume that these things sprout up unbidden in the night like mushrooms, that wouldn't have surprised me too much. "Some people" do take the most miraculous things for granted, and therefore feel no compulsion to do their part to keep the cultural infrastructure strong and healthy. But "some other people" -- a group to which I belong -- are keenly aware that *someone* had to go to a lot of work before any of these projects even made it to the blueprint stage. Perhaps I'm so deeply embedded in that culture that I underestimate how many people fall into the other. So the suggestion that people wouldn't have noticed the impact of engineering on their lives just leaves me a little light-headed.

"Idealism abounds, do what we will to quash the trend." -- Walt Kelly

[eppur_se_muova]

5. One thing about the Seville installation which strikes me as strange ...

is the very large spacings between the mirrors. Why not put the same number of mirrors closer together? Is this because of wind/rain problems? If mirrors were more densely packed, even at different heights, the power output could be increased severalfold -- or the same power output drawn from a much smaller area.

BTW, how about a link to some of these "19 postings"?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6616651.stm

http://www.solucar.es/ (click on 'Tecnologias', then 'Dish Stirling' to see their Stirling systems. Caveat: their site doesn't always behave properly, I keep having to start over at the home page.)

NOTE: Look for small US flag buttons to choose English. Requires JavaScript. There doesn't seem to be a separate link for the English pages.