A little bit of desert to light up the entire U.S.
(Credit:
Ausra)
DAVIS, Calif.--Ausra CEO Peter Le Lievre says it will only take a little bit of desert to light up the United States.
Ausra has developed technology for converting heat from the sun into electricity. The trick is that it's far more efficient, the company claims, than traditional solar thermal technologies from companies such as Solel and Acciona.
The process works as follows: Water goes into a tube that sits over an array of flat mirrors in the desert. By the time it gets to the end of the tube, the water turns to steam, which then turns a generator. Ausra can use water, rather than oil like other companies, because its tube can withstand high pressures. You can read more about Ausra here, including the $40 million the company got.
Le Lievre told an audience at the Going Green conference that a 92-mile square (92 miles a side, which works out to be a little less than 8,500 square miles) in the desert--a very small amount--could provide all of the electricity in the country. "We are more than two times more efficient when it comes to land," he said. Update: We originally gave the wrong dimensions for that land area. The numbers are now correct.
Ausra's system is also cheaper, he claims. "We are at 10 cents a kilowatt hour today," he said. With mass manufacturing, we will fall below gas (natural gas plants) and beat coal."
Those are big words. Solar thermal now costs about twice as much as regular electricity. Regular electricity goes for around 5 to 8 cents a kilowatt hour.
Ausra will have a chance to prove its case. The company, which wants to build a 175-megawatt plant in California that would take up a square mile, is getting the permits now and hopes to have it operating in three years.
as in the case with the Colorado River, the Nile River, the Tigris
River, et al, but in underground aquifers. Furthermore you could
aqueduct it in. That being said I would think that they would
condense the steam back into feed water after it passed through
the generator.
steam -> turbine->water->start over
What is the "total cost of ownership" when figuring in maintenance and repairs over time?
Don't get me wrong I think it's a good idea if it can be made workable. At a minimum it could REDUCE our dependence on fossil fuels, even if we didn't use it as our sole source of power.
area. So, 92 square miles would be 16,000 megawatts. I think the
total generating capacity of the US is about 1 million megawatts.
Am I calculating wrong?
This remains relatively small compared to the available desert area.
175*8464 megawatts or 1,481,200 megawatts?
I am thinking this is like photonic solar power. charge batteries so you can run at night :)
consumption in the long run also, or at least keep it from growing exponentially........
It doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition on replacing fossil fuels. One step at a time......
This isn't going to replace all of the other power plants, but it is a novel idea and could be a lot interesting than the wind farms or photo-arays. It is certainly more interesting that the coal or fossil fuel plants.
It would be perfect in a utopian 3rd World Country too - providing plentiful electrity to "the people". If only security were not an issue - as it always is.
That's part of what makes wind energy a bit dubious, IMHO: since max power demand is usually on a hot day, what if the wind isn't blowing that day? You still need to build enough conventional power generation capacity to handle the max power demand--building additional wind generators on top of that just runs up the expense.
- Great concept
- by Travis Ernst September 11, 2007 8:59 PM PDT
- Haywood... Fine, we throw up the panneling on our roofs...
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(18 Comments)where do the drycells and or sub stations go to handle the
generated power for the neighborhood? Who gets to have their
home torn down. See the problem if we do it that way. You
want them in your basement, or a shed in the backyard? Good
idea, but maintaining the local "grid" or per home power
reduction that co-ops frequently do is then the issue.
This large scale solar "farm" (best term I can think of) will only
add power to the national grid. So be it (example) Ohio can
keep power closer to the eastern coast an not have to sell it to
California when they have the draw. Yes thats a frequent
purchase. It doesn't matter WHERE they buy from, it is who has
excess available. Or Maine Yankee (nuke) can sell it to the grid
if Sharon Harris can't generate enough to meet the demand, or
High Bridge (gas) whatever plant you want in the example. It
happens every day in every states grid.
Look at how many transformers we have in our homes. They are
a frequent waste of power. I started to keep the ones I rarely
use unplugged just to save on my bills. Unplugged about 4 1A
units. You don't realize how much power you waste.