Is this "solar tower" thing in Australia ever going to happen?

[TheLoadedDog]

@Askance

II don’t believe a single sod of earth was ever turned.

And a good thing too.

You can just imagine if they had actually built this thing. It’d now be ten or fifteen years old, looking decidedly down-at-heel, half of the investors would have pulled out, and you’d be left with a windswept retro-futuristic ghost town an inconvenient distance from Adelaide. Peeling billboards proclaiming the “Information Super Highway” (A term only surpassed in ugliness by “Multi Function Polis” itself) in the process of slowly being reclaimed by desert.

Thiese things are passable on a small scale. There’s a “technology park” in Sydney, but even that is struggling, I believe.

[antechinus]

Yes Colophon, the solar tower is going to happen.

The company cannot put up a project plan on the website because of a continuous disclosure agreement with the ASX.

Although the project is classed as State Government significant development, which means it will be fast tracked, there are still many planning stages that need to be completed before construction can commence.

There are two new technologies to incorporate into the project that will:

• improve the efficiency of the collecter roof using new membrane material
• allow the structure to store heat as well as collect

This will allow make it feasible for smaller structures to be built.

Or so I hear.

I have a feeling there will be a significant press release soon. Shares in the company seem to increase with each significant press release.

Check out the ‘news’ section on the Enviromission site.

[Colophon]

Thanks antechinus, that’s the sort of info I was looking for.

(I don’t think this technology would work so well in England, somehow )

[BubbaDog]

@Colophon

Well yes, that was exactly my thought on browsing through their news releases. Ah well, our collective cynicism will no doubt be punished when these grass-roots investors become “free energy” billionaires

Well I’ll go ahead and smile with you but I gotta tell you:

I just spent the last two months going over the tech specs from everything between pulverized coal generation to batteries, superconducting magnets and just about everything else that real companies are doing to produce sparks. I’ve poured over pages on photovoltaics and solar thermal methods including parabolic trough, central reciever, and parobilic dish schemes. The list includes what’s working, what’s being built, and what’s feasible in the future. Funny thing is, while emerging technologies all over the world are available in my sources, these guys don’t seem to show up.

Does their process work? It might. But if it costs a million dollars a kw to build it (compared to approx $3000 for the typical windmill and $500 for a natural gas plant) the free energy has to pay off a lot of capital investment before it starts to be really free

[BubbaDog]

@antechinus

Yes Colophon, the solar tower is going to happen.

The company cannot put up a project plan on the website because of a continuous disclosure agreement with the ASX.

At first glance that sounds like a great excuse, but companies that are really committed would present a well documented business plan in order to attract quality capital. Are they afraid somebody else will jump in front of them and build their own giant solar tower?!

I have a feeling there will be a significant press release soon. Shares in the company seem to increase with each significant press release.

Check out the ‘news’ section on the Enviromission site.

It’s called pump-and-dump. Lot’s of sham companies do it in order to suck money out of the deal. The major shareholders (ie insiders who set this up) acquire shares either during “no news” periods or have shares handed to them from the company for “services rendered”. They dump those shares after positive spin “press releases” that get the general public interested.

[Askance]

OK, got my info from New Scientist but you’ll have to take my word for the accuracy of the quotes unless you are a subscriber. The piece I was thinking of is a letter, not the main article.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18324585.900 :

As a means of converting sunlight into electricity, they are horribly inefficient: much less than 1 per cent of the energy in the sunlight hitting the plastic was eventually converted to electricity. In the Manzanares tower half the solar energy was lost as heat from the collector, and of the heat that was trapped only 0.7 per cent was converted to electricity by the turbine. The rest escaped as hot air from the top of the tower. By comparison, photovoltaic solar panels convert about 15 per cent of sunlight falling on them into electricity.

But Luzzi also concedes that the vast greenhouse at the foot of the tower might subtly alter the area’s microclimate, by changing the reflectivity or albedo of the surrounding surface. This could lead to shifts in local humidity, temperature and wind that could affect the tower’s capacity to generate electricity - for better or worse. “The effect of changing the albedo is still a big question,” says Luzzi. “But it might - and I want to emphasise might - increase the ambient temperature outside the tower, altering the pressure difference between the top and the bottom.” EnviroMission is seeking government funding to run a number of research projects, including a microclimate impact analysis

And two letters:

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18324613.900 :

As a rather simple back-of-the-envelope calculation will establish, the amount of energy necessary to obtain the raw materials and erect such a gigantic solar tower would be considerably more than the estimated energy extracted. Therefore it is not a truly renewable resource and can be erected only if there is sufficient fossil energy left on Earth.

However, there might be a value if the generated power could be used to create an oasis of vegetation with its own ecosystem in the Australian desert. This may be sustainable. Colonel Gaddafi is attempting to do something similar in the Libyan desert.

The problem with the above para is that it is not being built in the desert, but in an area already arable.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18324634.500 :

There is an attraction in the solar “power tower” in that it may be, at the moment, more cost-effective than conventional photovoltaics. However, it is considerably more expensive than wind power and likely to be overtaken by other solar technologies even before it is completed (31 July, p 42).

This would not be a problem if it were a small investment, but this project will potentially absorb the majority of all renewables expenditure in Australia for years, effectively displacing many much more worthwhile smaller efforts. The effect on public confidence of a failure of this magnitude should not be underestimated.