Putting the Sun's Temperature in a Tube: SEHC Labs Turns Up the Heat on Solar Thermal Energy
by Matthew McDermott, Brooklyn, NY on 07.24.08
image: SHEC
Solar Hydrogen Energy Corporation Labs has announced that they have developed the world’s most efficient solar thermal energy technology. Though only at the prototype stage, SEHC has developed a way to concentrate sunlight to levels 5,000 that which normally fall on the Earth’s surface. By focusing the light through a tube the heat can approach 6,000°C, a temperature which can melt metal at the light’s focus point. In order to keep the system from self-destructing the heat has to be continually pulled off the tube and put to work elsewhere.
The SEHC Solar Thermal Reactor
Pure Energy System News explains how SHEC has managed to harness this intense energy:
The light enters the aperture of a long, cylindrical tube lined with a highly-reflective coating. That might seem counter-intuitive, but what happens is that as the light bounces back and forth down and then back up that tube, 95% of the heat energy is gradually—rather than suddenly—absorbed by the tube before the light bounces back out the aperture.In the commercial unit, the receiver apparatus will be about the size of a 45-gallon drum, and the aperture and tube will be around four inches in diameter.
This array will result in a 11,000-fold concentration of the sun's energy. SHEC pulls the heat off of that tube to perform work.
Three Gigawatts of Solar Thermal Power to Be Developed
If that sounds far fetched to readers, it doesn’t to investors: SHEC says it has signed agreements to develop 3 GW of solar thermal facilities—six farms of 500 MW each—beginning next year, using this technology. Though the cost of developing a solar thermal array using this technology will be expensive, SHEC says the payback time for its facilities will be five to fifteen years.
Considering that this technology is only a prototype at this point, I’d be surprised if there weren’t some growing pains scaling this to a commercial-level, let alone developing six 500 MW farms. There’s a big difference between proving a concept works and bringing it into commercial production. Hopefully I wrong though, and SHEC will be able to bring greater efficiency and more power to the solar thermal power sector.
via :: Pure Energy Systems News and :: Eco Geek
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That is one complicated looking contraption. I can totally understand the motivation behind building these "farms" of solar panels and what not into centralized stations. However, I'd like to see some more tech that's geared toward individuals households. To me it seems logical that the more power generation you have going on at the household level the better. It's like distributed computing. Take the most advanced supercomputer in the world and compare it to 100,000 or a million nodes in a distributed computing network and they'll blow that super computer away without breaking a sweat.
Is it complicated? I dare say that the engine on a lawn-mower or the compressor on a fridge is equally or more complex than this device. I say this only to comment that we already have fairly complex devices strewn around the house (granted that one's fridge does not heat up to 6k degrees); perhaps it's not so far-fetched to have such a solar thermal set up on the rooftop someday?
I agree, stradric. Distributed generation also improves energy security: whether you are talking about terrorists or tornadoes, centralized power generation provides bigger targets. In a distrbuted system, if a few houses' generators (wind, solar, etc.) go down, their neighbors still have power. Do it right, and even those houses still have power!
@ stradric
Your computer analogy is a bit wrong. A supercomputer is a collection of cores in a central location. So we can either have ten 10,000 core supercomputers, or 100,000 computers in individual house holds. The distributed systems are a maintenance nightmare. It's so much easier to manage a few supercomputers in a central location. Google doesn't host each server in a unique location; it has a few huge server farms to host its thousands of servers.
This is the case with energy as well. Individual systems, like rooftop PV and small wind turbines, will server strictly a supplemental role. I'd be surprised if they gained any kind of market penetration beyond niche uses. It's nice having your own power generation, but PV and personal wind turbines don't produce power reliably. You're still reliant on the grid. And distributed systems are hard to maintain, especially with oil production about to decline.
The kinds of systems that can produce baseload power all require economies of scale and large layouts of cash: concentrated solar, solar thermal, geothermal, tidal, wave, nuclear, and fusion. Even wind has better economies of scale. One 5MW wind turbine is 100% more efficent than 500 10K watt windturbines. Part of this is maintenance, but part is also the fact that power is proportional to the cross sectional area of the turbine. A 200 foot rotor gives four times the power of a 100 foot rotor, and 16x the power of a 50 foot rotor.
Don't worry, power will still be distributed. America currently has over 1000 gigawatts of installed installed electrical production. Since alternative energy plants tend to be in the 50-200 MW range (not to mention individual wind turbines which range from 1 to 5 MW each), it will require ten thousand of these all across the US to replace our current fossil fuel based system.
Reminds me of Solar Propulsion systems that NASA's been working on since 79'.