Infinia Plans Small-Scale Solar Stirling Dishes
by Justin Thomas, Virginia on 10.25.06
Infinia, a company based in Kennewick, Washington, plans to release a Stirling solar dish about the size of a large satellite TV receiver. Instead of using photovoltaic cells, it will use the sun's heat to generate electricity. Standard solar photovoltaic panels are generally 12 percent to 15 percent efficient at converting light to electricity, though some can go up to 22 percent. Infinia's planned 3-kilowatt Stirling engine will operate at 24 percent efficiency.
The product is slated for final design later this year and commercial release in 2008. The target customers for Infinia's first solar Stirling engine are larger organizations such as city governments. Infinia's dish looks like a scaled-down version of the dish by Stirling Solar Energy, which has been in development for many years. Stirling Solar Energy is building power plants with arrays of giant dishes with more than 80 mirrors in the California desert to generate hundreds of megawatts of electricity. It has signed two power generation contracts with California utilities. See ZDNET for more details.
:: Infinia via Jilted Citizen from Hugg via Living Green Forum via ZDNET
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The great thing about this solution is that it is very straight forward, engineering wise.
Any country with a reasonable manufacturing ability could build these by the thousands.
That means a country like India or China could put these in villages to provide the basic services; (cooking heat, light, water pumping) without a grid connection or firewood or lamp fuel.
Unlike PV, which still take a good deal of touchy specialised processes out of the reach of typical manufacturers, Stirling engines are bone simple. Other than some moderately advanced electronics, this thing is only marginally more complicated than a lawn mower. This is a real world solution that can make a difference!
I'm wondering how much this will cost.. it would be nice if these were placed alongside bird baths as yard decoration. They actually look pretty good if the rendering is correct.
Interesting comment, slr_pwrd_3rd_wrld. That would mean that there's possibly another benefit. A simple device with no silicon panels to bake will require less energy to manufacture, thus reducing greenhouse gases by both the end user and the factory.
So how much is it likely to be?
If interested in this your readers might like a really clear description of how the stirling engine has been refined and tuned for this application, and exactly how it works: http://www.solarevents.com/articles/solar-energy/solar-energy-stirling-engine/
I like the design of this one much more than that of Stirling Solar. Its far less complicated and should be far less than the $250,000 per unit that Stirling Solar is presently operating with.
As far as efficiency, these types are king. With a dedicated sun tracker, there will be more hours of peak power produced and at a higher efficiency.
Check out an even smaller scale version of this technology here:
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-3023202903346777381&q=sterling+solar