Suppose you wanted to create a low tech heat generator using rising solar heated air. You decided to cover a 4 acre plot of desert land with some kind of plastic or glass that you determined would best trap heat. The cover was sloped upwards channeling all the rising air through a turbine of some kind.
What kind of controls would you need to maximize efficiency? Variable inlet holes for fresh air? Would something like this be comparable to modern solar panels in efficiency even if not as compact or practical?
That was a good article, it seems like the perfect type of project for a few mechanically inclined types to set up on a small scale and then start refining for better efficiency and outputs. The height of those chimneys kind of blew me away. That alone would make it not feasible for the DYI types.
There is a more basic device simply for ventilation/passive cooling, called a solar chimney. It doesn’t generate electricity, but it moves air without electricity. A simple solar chimney just uses solar heating to move the air. This can be combined with use of Bernoulli effect to take advantage of breezes. It can be combined with geothermal cooling as well.