Renewable Energy Universe

admin answers:

The first thing is the cost!
The second thing is how to met the customer requirements, i.e. What are the objectives targeted?

Here are some photos

http://images.google.ca/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=solar%20power%20plants&rlz=1W1GGLR_en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

Guru

admin answers:

This is a very open ended question.

It could be as little as $10. But this solar power plant would only produce enough energy to light a very small Light Bulb!!

It all depends on the power output of the power station. I would estimate that it would cost about 100 times what it costs to build a fossil fuel powered plant for each megawatt of power produced.

So, a 10GW (Giga Watt) oil fired power plant may cost $1billion to build, so a 10GW solar plant would cost about $100billion to build (and would probably take up 1000 times the land space required for the oil plant)

And they wonder why solar hasn’t caught on yet!

admin answers:

I like the “linear fresnel” designs by AusRa: Long strips of reflective surfaces pointed at long elevated collectors. Thermal solar requires about 3 square meters per kilowatt, and there might also need to be a turbine building and a heat exchanger (might be like a river, or hyperbolic cooling tower). You might provide a break area for workers cleaning the mirrors, or a ring of trees to collect dust blowing in from outside the reservation.

admin answers:

Don’t listen to the person making the suggestion. What you propose would cost 10 of millions of dollars

admin answers:

Yes you can, but then the fact that the CD’s are circular will waste reflecting area unless you cut square each CD and arrange them in the VW roof. By the way, the use of the VW’s roof is because its shape is almost a perfect parabola and you can concentrate the sun rays in its focus. You may get the heating capacity per square feet of CD by building a prototype of this condenser and expose to solar radiation, measure the temperature and time it takes the water to boil, and rise the steam to superheat. You may use an enthalpy diff. Such as to return saturated steam to the boiler to preheat the incoming water make-up. With the enthalpy diff value you will get BTU/H-Ft2, the rest is to apply this result to the design of the turbine, that depends of what do you want it to drive.