Using Solar Energy to Create Wind Power
[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]A very interesting idea! I'd love to see a prototype in action.
http://www.treehugger.com/wind-technology/Using-solar-energy-create-wind-power.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Works in the opposite direction.
http://www.enviromission.com.au/EVM/content/media_animations.html
.
.
.
[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]If you actually read the article and followed any of the links, you'd know. 
From the links, the answer is "We have a lot of business skills and a couple of patents
and are LOOKING FOR INVESTORS so we hope that puff-pieces like this will help".
On the other hand, they have a lot of builders and sales experience ...
>> From normal to ideal circumstances the Tower should have a potential hourly yield of
>> 1,100 to 1,500 megawatt hours available for sale to the power grid.
Sounds good ...
>> The annual capacity factor for the downdraft portion of the Energy Tower is
>> predicted at approximately 51%.
Doesn't sound quite as good.
The only way that they can cheat that figure upwards is to use the "External Wind Capture"
potential (i.e., straightforward wind turbine generation without any of the whizzy hi-tech gadgets
to sell their project at a higher price than a standard wind farm).
Couldn't see anything in their blurb about how they recapture the water
that they're pumping up to the top of the tower (taking ~1/3 of the generated
power ... when it's generating of course else it takes it off the coal/gas/nuke grid).
Other than being another prayer to the gods of technology & dodgy finance, I can't see
why this is better than a wind farm.
A tower hundreds of meters high (likely over a kilometer) adds an incredible expense that doesn't offset the marginally better capacity factor (and no, I don't much credit the addition of vanes to pick up natural winds... because that just makes the tower that much harder to build - and thus more expensive)
Some thoughts:
Where are the ideal places to site something like this? Areas that a hot and dry most of the year (which is why they picked Arizona for a proposed first test). What do such locations tend to lack in abundance? Water. And no... I don't buy that the system "generates clean water".
What do such locations also share? They're already ideal spots for solar power which already peaks during the times of day when this would be most effective and when demand also tends to peak. Why not just go with solar? It HAS to be cheaper. If you need less variability, then go solar thermal with storage. This monster will still be unavailable much of the time - temperature inversions, rain (or just high humidity), unusually cool days, etc.
I don't see how this is remarkably better than just building properly-sited wind turbines. And how many people who find wind power to be unsightly are going to fall in love with this beast?
I don't buy their power generation estimates either. I'd love to see the math.
I should also point out that this is hardly anything new. Some Israelis proposed just such a concept decades ago... including an intent to use it for desalinization (which may be where the nonsense about generating clean water comes from).
In short - there's a reason why their stock is at .02/share... one that P.T. Barnum was credited with coining over a century ago.
