>>>> Thailand’s neighboring countries have it or are planning to get it. Neighbors further away, such as China and Japan are fully committed to nuclear. No matter that Japan has had some safety breaches – one as recently as July 2007 (note: this booklet was written before the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan), where a very large reactor suffered leaks caused by an earthquake. The leaks weren’t so dangerous, but Japanese authorities waited many hours before informing the public. China may have had its share of mishaps, but we may never know, as it’s a closed society. Chinese authorities would not disclose bad news unless it was forced to, or had no alternative. In other words, if authorities can away with hushing up radiation leaks, they’ll surely do so.
Indonesia and Vietnam want to go nuclear. Even cash-strapped Burma announced, in the summer of 2007, its plans for building a nuclear plant with Russian assistance. A big reason why Thailand’s officials are so determined to go nuclear is the fact that many other Asian countries are going that route, and Thailand is worried it will lose prestige by not joining the crowd.
more reasons why Thai authorities are so determined to go nuclear……
>>>> Nuclear promises very large contracts. Where there are large contracts, there are large pay-offs. In Thailand, one goes hand in hand with the other. No exceptions.
>>>> Lucrative contracts extend beyond the plant construction – …on to fuel supply, maintenance, security, to disposal of waste, to eventual decommissioning of the plant.
The following info mentions some of the cutting edge
technologies and companies dealing with ‘concentrated solar’
If this entire text mentioned nothing else, it would be useful to just have this list.
It was culled from the URL
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Concentrated_Solar_Power
which is an offshoot of Wikipedia.net.
Solar Concentrators can be divided into several categories, among them; photovoltaic systems and thermal systems. Photovoltaic systems (a.k.a. ‘solar panels or PV panels) turn light directly into electricity. The pretty blue panels you see in some shops (though rarely seen in Thailand) are great. But advances in PV panels are happening at a phenomenal clip. Vast ‘solar parks’ with thousands of large PV panels are being developed in SW America, Western Europe, Australia and other locales. Will Thailand get on board? Let’s hope so.
Thermal systems use the concentrated sunlight to create heat which typically turns a turbine. One popular design uses salt which quickly gets molten by the intense focused heat of a field of mirrors. Which would you rather have powering turbines in your town, water heated by molten salt, or water heated by radioactive yellowcake?
|
Forget Lightning. How Do We Catch Sunshine in a Bottle?
Renewable power is inspiring clever new ways to store electricity—and to uncork it exactly when and where it is needed.
by Maggie Koerth-Baker
From Discover Magazine, June 2009 issue published online at http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jun/18-forget-lightning-how-do-we-catch-sunshine-in-a-bottle
Renewable energy has a critical role to play in reducing greenhouse gases and leading the United States toward energy independence. That role should soon be getting bigger: The U.S. government is pushing for a 100 percent increase in renewable energy by 2012. The two biggest sources are the wind and the sun. But the variable nature of wind and solar energy can cause problems with matching supply to demand—problems that would be greatly eased if only we had a really good way of storing electricity on an industrial scale. Currently there are several storage systems vying for dominance.
Compressed-Air Energy Storage At night, when the strongest winds blow and customers are sleeping, unused wind-generated electricity can run giant compressors, forcing large amounts of air into sealed underground spaces. When demand rises during the day, the compressed air can be used to spin turbines, turning the energy back into electricity. Georgianne Peek, a mechanical engineer at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, says this technology can provide a lot of power over long periods of time at a relatively low cost. The technology is also well established: Two compressed-air storage plants have been in operation for decades. The McIntosh Unit 1 plant in McIntosh, Alabama, went online in 1991; a similar plant in Germany has been running since the 1970s. McIntosh 1 can reliably put out 110 megawatts for 26 hours. (One megawatt is enough power to supply roughly 600 to 1,000 typical American homes.)
The compressed-air system does have its drawbacks. For one, it does not completely eliminate the need for fossil fuels, because the associated electric generators use natural gas to supplement the energy from the stored compressed air. Compressed-air storage systems also require an airtight underground space, limiting the locations where they can be installed. The two existing compressed-air plants use natural salt domes. Engineers flushed the domes with water to dissolve the salt, then pumped out the brine to create a nicely sealed cavern. But salt dome formations are not plentiful, so researchers are investigating other inexpensive ways to create storage chambers. A facility proposed for Norton, Ohio, would use an abandoned limestone mine. Another, in Iowa, would pump air into drained natural aquifers. Abandoned oil wells and depleted natural gas reservoirs might also work, Peek says, as long as they are not too remote to be hooked into the electrical grid.
Molten Salt Heat Exchanger The sun, like the wind, is a variable source of energy, disappearing at night and ducking behind clouds at inconvenient moments. Thermal storage systems, such as molten salt heat exchangers, mitigate those problems by making solar power available anytime.
Right now only one example exists: Spain’s Andasol Power Station, which began operating last fall. Andasol has about 126 acres’ worth of trough-shaped solar collectors that focus the sun’s heat onto pipes full of synthetic oil. The hot oil is piped to a nearby power plant, where it is used to generate steam. During the day, some of the oil is used to heat a mixture of liquid nitrate salts (made by combining elements like sodium and potassium with nitric acid) to temperatures above 700 degrees Fahrenheit. These liquid salts can retain their heat for weeks in insulated tanks. When the collectors cannot generate enough power to meet demand, the salts are drawn out from the tanks and their heat is tapped to run the power plant. A full stockpile of molten salts can keep the Andasol plant running at top capacity—50 megawatts of electricity—for up to seven and a half hours.
Molten salt backup systems make solar power more flexible and reliable, says Frank Wilkins of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Program. Wilkins says that thermal storage systems can increase a solar plant’s annual capacity factor (the percentage of time, on average, that the plant is operational) from 25 percent to up to 70 percent. Expense is the biggest drawback. The Andasol Power Station cost about $400 million, and that was just for phase one of a planned three-phase project. But costs may come down as more plants are built. This past February, the Arizona Public Service power utility announced plans to construct a power station similar to Andasol. It is expected to go online in 2012.
Sodium-Sulfur Batteries Sodium-sulfur batteries work much the same way as the lead-acid battery that starts your car; both use chemical reactions to store and produce electricity. The difference lies in the materials used. Lead-acid batteries contain a lead plate and a lead dioxide plate (the electrodes) in a bath of sulfuric acid (the electrolyte). A reaction between the lead and the acid creates the electric current. Lead-acid batteries are simple and reliable, but they are impractical to use on wind farms because of the amount of space and power electronics they would require.
The sun is a variable source of energy, disappearing at night. Thermal storage systems make solar power available at any time.
Sodium-sulfur batteries, which use molten sodium and sulfur as electrodes and a solid ceramic electrolyte, have a higher energy density. “Lead-acid batteries are cheaper,” Peek says. “But you can get the same amount of energy in a smaller amount of space with sodium-sulfur—and that’s important, because real estate costs money too.” Sodium-sulfur batteries can also be charged up to the maximum and discharged completely, which makes them more efficient. And they last about 20 years, versus three to five years for lead-acid.
Some U.S. utility companies, including Xcel Energy, have installed small-scale combinations of wind farms and sodium-sulfur batteries. (American Electric Power’s is not yet operational.) Excess electricity from the wind farms can be stored in the batteries and fed into the system later, when wind is low and demand is high. Each battery system, which is roughly the size of a semitrailer, can store about one megawatt and discharge it over six to eight hours. The downside, again, is cost, which is high in part because there are no American companies making sodium-sulfur batteries; the only manufacturers are in Japan.
Zinc bromide and vanadium redox flow batteries are other promising technologies. Although not as far along in development as sodium-sulfur, they may be easier to scale up. Vanadium batteries may also charge and discharge more quickly than sodium-sulfur, so they might be better suited to smoothing out power fluctuations caused by rapidly changing weather.
Hydrogen Hydrogen-based energy storage looks great on paper: Use electricity to split hydrogen out of water, then convert the hydrogen back into electricity in a fuel cell when needed. Alas, the underlying technology is expensive and complicated, but MIT chemist Daniel Nocera may have found a better way. His hydrogen-ion-creating system uses an indium tin oxide electrode and a container of water with cobalt and potassium phosphate mixed in. Put the electrode in the water and add voltage. Cobalt, potassium, and phosphate migrate to the electrode, forming a catalyst that begins splitting water molecules into oxygen gas and hydrogen ions. Unlike most existing systems, the materials are fairly inexpensive, and the catalyst renews itself so it lasts a long time.
Nocera is still seeking a cheap way to convert hydrogen ions into hydrogen gas and an efficient way to get electricity from photovoltaic panels to the catalyst. But he thinks his approach will help other pieces of the hydrogen infrastructure fall into place. “The discovery opens doors we haven’t been able to walk through before,” Nocera says. “I don’t think this will be as hard.”
|
* * * * * * *
15. Solar for Power Generating Plants
Ausra is at the vanguard of large scale power
generation. Its solar storage system generates power at centralized stations
using concentrating solar power to create steam that turns a turbine to make
electricity. It also stores hot water that a power plant can draw on during
times when the sun is not shining, reducing the cost to 8 cents per kilowatt
hour, compared to 12 cents for natural gas.
http://www.ausra.com/
Solar Two has built a 10-megawatt Solar Two power tower pilot plant
near Barstow, California. It collects and stores concentrated solar energy in
molten salt and generates electricity when needed by the utility and its
customers. The unique storage capability allowed solar energy to be collected
when the sun is shining and electric power to be generated even when the sun is
not shining.
Details: http://www.energylan.sandia.gov/sunlab/Snapshot/STFUTURE.HTM
SkyFuel was awarded a grant by the
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop its advanced Concentrating Solar
Power system known as the Linear Power Tower for utility-scale solar thermal
power plants. LPT is a high-temperature linear Fresnel system with molten salt
storage. The diagram at left looks like a grill for an air conditioner, but it
actually shows a football pitch-sized array of solar mirrors.
HelioDynamics uses solar concentrators use mirror banks
which concentrate solar radiation onto a receiver unit to produce heat or a
combination of heat-and-power. They are designed to be mounted on roofs, on
parking lots and in open-field sites. Units can be added to produce MW
capacities of power. http://www.hdsolar.com/ -
Nevada Solar One is a 64-megawatt power plant
outside of Las Vegas, Nevada which supplies electric power to the municipal
grid. Acciona Solar Power built
the plant. Press Release: http://news.com.com/Solar+thermal+energy+making
+a+comeback/2100-11392_3-6189468.html?tag=cd.lede -
EMCORE
Received a $24 Million Purchase Order for Concentrator Solar Cells from Green
and Gold Energy
EMCORE Corporation has been awarded an order for 3 million
solar cells for use in GGE's SunCube(TM) terrestrial concentrator system. This
105 MW purchase order represents the largest procurement of concentrator solar
cells in the industry to date.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070806/nym035a.html?.v=3
EMCORE attained a record 39% conversion efficiency under 1000x concentrated
illumination on its multi-cell products currently in high
volume production.
http://www.emcore.com/
* * * * * * *
16. Concentrated Solar
November 2010 – The Concentrated Solar Power plant of Ain Beni Mathar is now supplying electricity to the Moroccan grid. Located in the East of Morocco near the Algerian border, it will provide numerous lessons for further diffusion of concentrated solar power technology. This plant uses a cutting edge design, combining a large array of 224 parabolic mirror collectors concentrating sun energy and boosting the steam output needed to produce electricity in this 470MW facility. Two other plants with similar design will soon be commissioned in Egypt and Algeria. Source: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/MENAEXT/MOROCCOEXTN/0,,print:Y~isCURL:Y~contentMDK:22750446~menuPK:294545~pagePK:2865066~piPK:2865079~theSitePK:294540,00.html
Los
Alamos Renewable Energy -
Solar Reduction of
Carbon Dioxide (SOLAREC™) produces fuel while simultaneously producing electricity from solar energy, at a cost competitive with fossil fuel generated power. The fuel can be burned at night to produce power 24/7 with no environmentally harmful by-products. The process has an over-all efficiency of nearly 48%. http://www.lare.us/
Compare the aforementioned 48% efficiency with the efficiency of nuclear. If all the factors for nuclear are factored in (mining, processing, shipping, security, plant maintenance, insurance, dealing with radioactive waste, eventual decommissioning of nuclear, etc.) …..the resultant efficiency of nuclear would probably under 6%.
Menova
Energy developer of the Power-Spar®
solar concentrator can be configured for electricity, heat, cooling and/or
lighting solutions. It consists of a parabolic trough reflector which
concentrates the sun's energy onto a modular absorber. Capable of capturing up
to 80% of the sun's energy, Power-Spar systems can reduce energy bills by as
much as 70%. http://www.power-spar.com
SpectroLab has continued to produce world-record (terrestrial)
concentrator cells, the latest of which is the 40.7% efficient http://www.spectrolab.com/
PhotoVolt – features Vertical
Multi-Junction (VMJ™) solar cells for photovoltaic power systems that are
cost-competitive with traditional fossil-fuel sources of electricity. A postage
stamp size VMJ cell delivers 100 watts at 1000 suns.
Press Release:
http://users.adelphia.net/~esch/index.html
AzurSpace has developed Triple Junction Cells on Ge Substrate for Concentrations up to 1000x. Supplier for commercial and large scale systems via SOL3G http://www.sol3g.com/ http://www.azurspace.com/
* * * * * * *
17. Solar Thermal Systems
Schott is a pioneer in developing receivers for
Solar Thermal Power Plants – the heart of solar power systems. Schott built the
first Solar Thermal Parabolic Trough Power Plant in The U.S. The photo shows a large acreage tract of
mirrors, all directing the sun’s rays on one spot – which in turn gets very
hot. That’s basically what electricity
generation is about; generate high heat to power generators. http://schott.com
Solargenix Nevada Solar One has built a 64-megawatt Solar Thermal Electric Generating Plant located in Boulder City, Nevada. Also by Solargenix: The Winston Series Compound Parabolic Collector (CPC) using non-imaging optics to focus sunlight onto a high efficiency absorber tube. Can be used for solar water heating, space heating and solar cooling applications. http://www.solargenix.com/
The
Saguaro Solar Generating Station uses rows of parabolic mirrors to
focus the sun’s rays onto SCHOTT PTR 70® receivers, enabling the generation of
clean electricity.
Solel’s
Mojave Solar Park is a 553
megawatt solar thermal plant on 6,000 acres (15,000 rai) of the Mojave Desert,
Arizona. The plant will use Solel's solar thermal parabolic trough technology
which has powered nine operating solar power plants in the Mojave Desert and is
currently generating 354 MW of annual electricity. http://www.solel.com/
|
|
Solucar 600-mirror Solar Tower in Seville Spain is the first commercial concentrator station in Europe. It
focuses
Sunlight onto water pipes at the top of a 40-storey concrete
tower, which drives a turbine to generate 11 megawatts of
electricity. Thousands more mirrors will be added to further
boost the output. Added details: http://www.solucar.es/
Shuff Steel from Phoenix Arizona, is in partnership with Stirling Corporation building a solar farm located north of Los Angeles. It is to produce 500 megawatts of power from 20,000 25-kilowatt Stirling solar dishes that are 38 feet tall. The project includes an option where the farm could be expanded to 850 megawatts and 34,000 dishes. Rather than PV panels, the solar farm’s panels harnesses heat from the sun with 82 mirrors and reflect it toward a series of hydrogen-filled tubes that expand when heated. The expanding gas cycles back and forth from cold to hot, and its movement powers a piston that creates up to 25 kilowatts of power.
|
The deal mentioned above is in close coordination with Southern California Electric (SCE) which is a municipal power company, serving a similar function for California, as EGAT does for Thailand. SCE has a voter-imposed mandate that 20% of its electric power must be from alternative sources by the year 2017. Even before this new solar farm (me |