The historical destruction of the "Solar One" solar thermal plant by a toxic fire. [View All]

[NNadir]

Fundies are trying to pretend that the idea of solar thermal plants is a new idea, discovered sometime last week.

Actually it is not.

The idea has been around for a long time, and has limited - because solar electricity is trivial - industrial demonstration.

Many of the existing plants have been poor performers, driving the investors to lose all of their money - although the plants were generally made to work after the fire sale of the assets. This all happened in the 1980's.

Nor has the grand solar fantasy proved risk free.

The second method of turning solar energy into electric power is solar thermal generation. The three most notable U.S. solar power electrical generation stations were sited in the Mojave Desert near Barstow, California. In each case solar energy was used to boil water, generating steam that drives a turbine, which in turn drives a generator--just as coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants do.

In the case of solar power, there is a problem: a pot of water put in the tropical sun at noon won't boil. And since the efficiency of a turbine generator is proportional to the difference between the ambient temperature and the temperature of the steam, water that's just boiling wouldn't be enough. A paltry 212F wouldn't even get the turbine moving. For reasonable efficiencies the temperature should be raised in the boiler to about 600E In this process, water is not directly heated during solar thermal power generation. Instead, an oil with special heat-transfer characteristics (therminol) is heated far above the boiling point of water and circulated through a heat exchanger.

The first of the solar plants in the Mojave Desert, Solar 1, was destroyed by a therminol fire. Its very similar successor, Solar 2, used thousands of computer-controlled mirrors to focus sunlight on a boiler on top of a tower. The plant occupied 130 acres and could produce 10,000 kW of electricity at peak power, although it only averaged 16 percent of this output. Doing a little math shows 1,600 kW from a land investment of 130 acres, or about 12.3 kW per acre, about a quarter of the theoretical photovoltaic installation previously discussed.

Of course the fundies - who get wedgies in their underwear of their is - gasp - radiation exposure outside of dental and medical offices - not counting of course coal - couldn't care less how many people were exposed to burned therminol fumes.

Another thing, there seems to be some dangerous fossil fuel apologetics involved:

Even SEGS, the largest operating solar plant in the world--also located in the Mojave Desert (fancy that)--which uses nine solar arrays with over 1,000,000 sun-tracking parabolic mirrors to concentrate solar energy, is not a wonder of efficiency. As advertised, the facility sounds great. It is rated at 354,000 kW of electrical output, roughly one-third the output of a major nuclear power plant. But its real average power is 77,000 kW--which means that the plant, which takes up a 1,600-acre site--generates 48 kW per acre and requires a natural gas boiler that contributes about 25 percent to its output.

http://socialissues.wiseto.com/Articles/169087496/?print

http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/761869-hh1dP8/webviewable/761869.pdf