quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
Unlike rooftop solar, which is a new generating paradigm and puts different and unplanned stresses on the grid that was designed for one way operation, these plants are basically just like any other generating facility. The just plug into the web as another supplier, and the output and use of the power generated would be taxed like any other electricity.

The facility in question is not generating electricity, so know worries about plugging into the grid. It's a giant solar cooker providing enough heat directly to make steel and cement.

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Originally posted by signewt:

quote:

Combine really efficient solar collector with molten salt storage and you have carbon free energy 24/7/365.

Including similar notion now under Oregon legislative concern, how much to charge those marvelous electric vehicles for 'road tax' absent their petroleum road tax fees.

In Tipton county Tennessee the road tax on electric or hybrid vehicles is $300 a year paid when you renew your tags.

Gates has quite a track record.

Cheaper cement/cheaper steel makes good sense - especially as one of the cheapest places in the world for cement manufacture, the Texas Hill Country, also has lots of sunshine.

quote:

Originally posted by kg5388:

quote:

Originally posted by signewt:

quote:

Combine really efficient solar collector with molten salt storage and you have carbon free energy 24/7/365.

Including similar notion now under Oregon legislative concern, how much to charge those marvelous electric vehicles for 'road tax' absent their petroleum road tax fees.

In Tipton county Tennessee the road tax on electric or hybrid vehicles is $300 a year paid when you renew your tags.

So the guy who drives his Tesla 100k miles a year pays the same amount as the guy who only drives his on the weekend maybe 10k miles a year. Love the way government works.

Great post! Thanks.

Now, if he could only get a bug free update release of Win 10 out, he'd be an intergalactic hero.

Read this and the first thing to come to mind was an old short story by Arthur C. Clarke in which soccer fans in a stadium use solar reflectors to "fry" an unpopular referee on the field.

"A Slight Case of Sunstroke"

Love the Arthur C. Clarke reference, bald1. That man was a time traveler from the future, right?

Technical Success
Commercial Failure

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
not sure I understand the breakthrough

there are already several operational systems out in the desert
(pic of solar field)

Yep. I thought of that myself. They've got them lots of places--I saw one in Spain. They also take up a LOT of real estate--dozens to hundreds of acres.

Have you guys ever seen a cement plant? I used to work around one. The liquid mix is entered into a long rotary kiln containing very hot air; the kiln is tilted such that the clinkers slowly make their way down to the discharge end, exposed to the hot air all the way. It takes quite a while for what is put in at the high end to come out at the low end. Using mirrors to focus the Sun to achieve the high temperatures required may not be a practical way to heat the air in the kiln--it is principally a way to create a very small hot spot AT A LOCATION WHERE THE MIRRORS COULD BE AIMED. Current mirror fields focus their beams on a collector located on a high tower OUTSIDE.

The same problem exists for producing steel--the heat has to be put into a crucible inside a building. It is not practical to use other mirrors to divert beams focused by the primary ones, both for efficiency and spatial reasons.

I don't disagree that high temperatures can be achieved by this technology, but attempting to move those high temperatures to the necessary operation points in the cement and/or steel industry seems quite a stretch to me.

flashguy

quote:

Originally posted by trapper189:
For those that didn't read the article, the break through is the heat generated is hot enough to make steel and cement. Salt vaporizes at the temperatures required to make cement, so molten salt is out as a storage mechanism.

I think you are replying to my comment. Current molten salt ranges are below the temps generated for steel, but I'm not sure what that has to do with anything

If you could combine really efficient solar collector with molten salt storage then you could have more cost effective solar energy.

Let's say you needed 2,000 acres of PV panels to generate 1mW of power (made up numbers), but with more efficient and accurate mirrors pointed using sensors, cameras, and AI you could generate as much power with 500 acres of more precise collector to heat exchanger/storage. Then there could be some really great uses for it. Just because it can heat stuff to 1000°C doesn't mean you have to. You could use a smaller array and make electricity more efficiently lowering cost for a collector set up just by slapping some additional tech, sensors, motors, actuators on a collector set up. Or you could retrofit and existing set up to make double the energy.

Plenty of possibilities for this tech.

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Originally posted by maladat:

quote:

Originally posted by Dakor:
Any article that uses the surface of the Sun as a temp reference, makes me shake my head in disgust. H-wood does the same damn thing. Yes, the surface is tens of thousands of Kelvins but the magnetosphere is MILLIONS of Kelvins. You can’t get to the surface unless you pass through it (good luck with that) and even then the magnetosphere occasionally encompasses the actual surface (sunspots)... so any idiot making a correlation is guilty of HYPE and therefore part of the lamestream media.

Actually, the "surface of the sun" temperature is the one that is the most relevant here.

It is impossible to use radiated energy to heat an object to a higher temperature than that of the object radiating the energy.

For the purposes of the sun's radiated energy, its temperature is ~5800 K, approximately the temperature of the surface of the sun.

If you covered the entire earth in mirrors and pointed them at something, you couldn't get it hotter than ~5800K.

So saying their solar concentrator can be used to get an object to "a quarter the temperature of the surface of the sun" is essentially a measure of the efficiency of their concentrator.

You missed the point of my post. They didn’t need the Sun reference whatsoever but its use makes the solar concentrator seem impressive to folk with little understanding of science.
Here’s an analogy: when I fart, the gaseous emissions are a fraction of the temp of the surface of the Sun. Sounds like my farts are thermonuclear, doesn’t it?

All y'all with your Kelvins and whatnot. All I wanna know is, can it heat my Jiffy Pop faster?

I’m thinking, if I remember that his properly, it could be used to heat molten sodium, and use that as the thermal reservoir/heat transfer fluid...

More global warming.

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Originally posted by Skins2881:

I think you are replying to my comment. Current molten salt ranges are below the temps generated for steel, but I'm not sure what that has to do with anything

My post was a combination of observations, not a direct reply to anyone, and now that I reread it, poorly written. I didn't mean to imply you had not read the first post.

You brought up molten salt as a storage mechanism for heat, an interesting one, but it won't work for the specific application being discussed.

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Originally posted by BBMW:
I was going to go there also. Maybe they figured out some sort of whizbang AI algorithm to control the mirrors.

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Originally posted by nhtagmember:
not sure I understand the breakthrough

there are already several operational systems out in the desert

AI is the buzzword of the day. So somehow that gives the whole idea more credibility. It’s marketing. That said, maybe they have a good idea that works - call it AI if it makes it sell better - oops, I mean get investments.

When I was in science class in the seventh grade (~1958) there was a discussion of solar furnaces that were used for high temperature research. The discussion pointed out that they used one-piece mirrors, and that that was their primary limitation: large mirrors were expensive, fragile, and difficult to manufacture.

As I sat in class my immediate thought was, “Would it be possible to do the same thing with many small mirrors?” As I recall I didn’t mention my idea, and I didn’t contact a patent attorney to protect it. Another opportunity missed.

quote:

Originally posted by Jimineer:

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
I was going to go there also. Maybe they figured out some sort of whizbang AI algorithm to control the mirrors.

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
not sure I understand the breakthrough

there are already several operational systems out in the desert

AI is the buzzword of the day. So somehow that gives the whole idea more credibility. It’s marketing. That said, maybe they have a good idea that works - call it AI if it makes it sell better - oops, I mean get investments.

They're using image recognition algorithms to guide mirror steering. Image recognition is an AI task.

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Originally posted by maladat:

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Originally posted by Jimineer:

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
I was going to go there also. Maybe they figured out some sort of whizbang AI algorithm to control the mirrors.

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
not sure I understand the breakthrough

there are already several operational systems out in the desert

AI is the buzzword of the day. So somehow that gives the whole idea more credibility. It’s marketing. That said, maybe they have a good idea that works - call it AI if it makes it sell better - oops, I mean get investments.

They're using image recognition algorithms to guide mirror steering. Image recognition is an AI task.

Sure. My real point was ~99.99% of people have no clue what AI is. But it’s the big new thing.
They could have just said they use image recognition to adjust the individual mirrors to optimize the heat generation process. But AI is more sexy. Sex sells.
Regardless, I hope it works as claimed.