Arizona to become 'Persian Gulf' of solar energy (Courtesy of Spanish company)

Associated Press ^ | February 22, 2008 | Unknown

[discostu]

Those of us who live here go out there. The desert is really interesting, a little hazardous, but fun.

[Brad from Tennessee]

[If solar energy were viable then it would not need to be subsidized by government.]

I agree. If it happens it will come with technological advances that interest utility companies enough to invest.

The problem with night time is explained in the article. There would be a wattage surplus during the day that would be stored in the form of compressed air which turns turbines at night.

SCIAM was dumbed down years ago and politicized to draw more subscribers.

[SuziQ]

There’s a LOT of desert out there, I’m sure there’s room enough for folks like you, and the solar array.

[SuziQ]

The best use of solar for hot water is the reserve tank method, the solar heats the water in a tank that going to refill your normal water heater. Makes the initial heating of the water take less energy.

That's what SirKit wants to do. He's working on a collector that is useful for more of the day, when the sun is at less than optimal angles.

[discostu]

Problem is the solar array is worthless. 3 square miles, a billion dollars, and only enough electricity for 70,000 homes. That’s the problem with all these “alternative” systems, they suck up vast tracts of land, huge quantities of money, and really provide next to nothing in electricity.

[Myrddin]

Corporate taxes need to be eliminated. They simply add to the cost of the end product. Using taxpayer subsidies to make an uncompetitive product competitive with another product that isn't getting subsidies is immoral. It pits the legitimate business against a taxpayer subsidized competitor. That is government meddling with the market.

[M203M4]

Then I think we are in agreement...

Anyway, what I really really really loath, however, are cash subsidies directed at these technologies.

[Locomotive Breath]

Like hydro there are a very limited number of sites and the initial cost is huge.

[3niner]

Well solar power has suffered from three primary shortcomings. 1) The cost per KWH is high. 2) The power density is low. 3) Power is generated only in the daytime.

Of these three shortcomings, the situation with the first is going to change a lot in the next few years. This company has made a major breakthrough in the production cost of solar cells. It's a private company, so you can't buy the stock (yet), but it will change the landscape of the solar power industry, in the near future.

The power density problem isn't going to change much, but low cost panels could be deployed in many less than optimal places, to make use of "wasted" sunlight. If these panels become cheap enough, it will become common for the roofs of houses to be covered with solar shingles, and south facing walls to be covered with vertical panels.

As for the problem of only getting power in the daytime, it simply means that solar power will never become the primary source of electricity. It is more suited for supplementing peak power usage in places where the peak usage occurs on hot days, and for powering things that need to get a given amount of work done in a day, but where it doesn't need to happen at a particular time.

[truthguy]

OH PLEASE! Nobody who has ever worked with compressed air thinks this is feasible at the power levels involved. This is completely unproven. Think about it. If compressed air could really store energy in this manner then we could get rid of our car engines (internal combustion) and just use compressed air. Totally unproven even under ideal lab conditions.

[Brad from Tennessee]

From the article:

Compressed-air energy storage plants have been operating reliably in Huntorf, Germany, since 1978 and in McIntosh, Ala., since 1991. The turbines burn only 40 percent of the natural gas they would if they were fueled by natural gas alone, and better heat recovery technology would lower that figure to 30 percent.

Studies by the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., indicate that the cost of compressed-air energy storage today is about half that of lead-acid batteries. The research indicates that these facilities would add three or four cents per kWh to photovoltaic generation, bringing the total 2020 cost to eight or nine cents per kWh.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan&page=2

[truthguy]

So the cost of compressed-air energy storage is 1/2 that of lead acid batteries. BFD. Who generates baseline electrical energy with lead-acid batteries? (Well maybe in old Diesel Submarines). You still need to heat the air with additional sources of natural gas which is in increasing short supply. There is also the assumption that you can generate a lot of excess energy during the day so that the air can be compressed. What about when you have 3 or 4 days without any sun as we have just had here in Northern California? And we get more sun that most other areas of the country. When I lived in Southwest Virgina it was common to not see the Sun for well over 1-2 weeks. That is true for most of the United States. Where are you going to get the compressed air then? What is the cost of compressing all this air? The fact that there is just one facility operating in Germany (probably subsidized by German Taxpayers) is really an admission that the technology is not feasible. If this technology is so feasible then why are there not many more countries using it? There were no numbers given about the amount of power produced from this German Facility. I wonder why. You also need to be near some sort of mine where you can store this compressed air. How many places is this feasible.
I am getting a little tired of all these proposed Rube Goldberg solutions to our energy problems. Few if ANY of these ideas are going to work. They are wasting a lot of time and confusing the ignorant political leaders. Many (probably most) political figures have little or no scientific or technological knowledge (read Al Gore) and hence they are easily fooled into believing that there is some silver bullet out there.
At least in the area of electrical energy generation we have one good solution and one only. We MUST build more Nuclear Power Plants and I do not mean just a few. We need to build several hundred. This would be a good start. For liquid (or portable)fuels we need to use the abundant supply of coal for synthetic fuels with the Fischer Tropsch process. This is proven technology. It was used in Germany in the 1940's (WWII) and in South Africa for the last 50 years. It is expensive but will be cost effective if the price of oil keeps going up and we all know that it will. If cellulosic ethanol pans out-great. I will jump for joy. Using corn to produce ethanol is madness. This takes as much energy as what you get out of the produced ethanol.
If we do not do these things soon we will have a very bleak future to deal with. I am not optimistic.