China plans 500-megawatt solar plant
Canadian Solar has been granted rights to develop a 500-megawatt solar power plant in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China, the company announced Wednesday.
Baotou is a manufacturing city on the Yellow River in Inner Mongolia with a population of over 2 million, according to the Chinese government's official Baotou Web site.
Canadian Solar's agreement is with the Administration Committee of Baotou National Rare-Earth Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone, also known as its Chinese abbreviation "CPT." The signed agreement includes rights "to design, install, operate, and maintain" the solar power plant in Baotou.
"To have a solar project of such magnitude in Baotou demonstrates our determination to develop the PV end-user market in China, as well as our commitment to cleaner and more sustainable economic development in Baotou," Fu Ren, the committee's director, said in a statement released to the U.S. press.
Canadian Solar, while founded in Canada, has subsidiaries based in China that already manufacture both solar cells and solar panel systems among other things. The Baotou solar project, subject to regulatory approval, will develop in three stages.
Stage one will include the installation of 100 megawatts of photovoltaics between September 2009 and December 2011, followed by two more development phases, each including 200-megawatt installations.
While the installation is massive, this is not the first of its kind. In October 2008, the U.S. Army announced plans to build a 500-megawatt solar thermal power farm in Fort Irwin, Calif. in an effort to reduce its annual energy costs.
And the newly formed Solar Trust was also recently granted rights to to develop the construction and installation of two or three 242-megawatt solar power plants for California that would be operational by 2013 or 2014.
Baotou, a city in Inner Mongolia, China, is about 12 hours northwest of Beijing by train.
(Credit: MultiMap from Bing)
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. E-mail her at candacelombardi@gmail.com. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. 
Not to mention you also incur significant losses in converting water to hydrogen, plus the fact that electrolysis of salt water is pretty much impossible due to oxidation of the anode. So you take an energy loss of 5-20% to create hydrogen from water, plus another much larger loss from the energy used to create fresh water in the first place.
Solar, wind, nuclear, hydro power being fed straight into high-efficiency batteries is the future. Scientists have already come up with a type of lithium battery that can be recharged in as fast as you can pump electricity into it, effectively, allowing for 60-120 second "refills" at a filling station. So yes, you'll still be able to take a cross-country trip on batteries, without the need to carry a giant, explosive tank of highly compressed hydrogen.
Oh, and the final nail in the hydrogen power coffin: battery powered vehicles only need 2 components, energy storage (battery) and a motor, while hydrogen vehicles need energy storage (explosive tank of death), a motor AND a highly complicated and expensive fuel cell.
You make it sound as if it is a fairy tale with batteries. Ever consider that batteries need to have mechanisms for charge regulation, thermal runaway prevention etc., have limited lives (years and charges), not as energy dense (WHr/kg) as fuels, expensive, materials for batteries need to be mined and so on and on?
Unless someone figures out a way to actually create energy from water, you will still have to use energy to "break" the water, then store the hydrogen, then later use the hydrogen to power a fuel cell (and thus make water again).
@tech_crazy I never meant that batteries are a fairy tale, and I am well aware of their limitations. However, as it currently stands, hydrogen is absolutely unfeasible, and will likely remain so until desalination, electrolysis and storage efficiency approach something more reasonable than they are now. It's just too many steps, too many parts and too many places wasting energy. As for the batteries, the first gen ones are STILL being used, after nearly 10 years, and when they finally die, they will still be sufficient for use as energy storage at solar/wind generation plants to cover night/calm periods. Once they are no longer sufficient for that, they can be recycled and used to make new batteries.
With all due respect, rechargeable batteries simply don't last that long. The most notorious are Li-ions. I have had laptop batteries go totally bad within a couple of years. That being said, I used to make batteries myself (not Li-ion of course) and have been following up on their development. From a true, ideal source of energy storage, I have given up on batteries.
I am sure most will not believe this, but I had come up with radical energy storage ideas (a few examples would be compressed air storage batteries, molten salt "batteries", concept of serial hybrid like the Volt etc.) more than a decade ago. Too bad I didn't file patents on them or publish papers. I hope not to repeat the mistake with my newer ideas.
- by owlafaye August 27, 2009 8:21 PM PDT
- When we invent a simple, small, device using little energy to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water ... then we can have hydrogen powered vehicles. When Scotty beams one down from his time warp we will all celebrate. In the meantime, scratch off hydrogen vehicles for the foreseeable future. Maybe in 2309 we will be there..."Back to Intergalactic space time please Scotty"
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