Solar Power Tower
This solar power tower in Spain acts as a powerful electricity generator and graceful work of landscape art. The 40-story high concrete tower is bathed in powerful rays of bright sunlight and it can be seen for miles. This effect is created by 600 large and intensely powerful mirrors which are used to concentrate the solar light and generate an astounding 11 Megawatts of Electricity! The plant generates enough energy to power the city of Seville and its population of 600,000!
YouTube: Solar Power Tower | More Videos
The tower focuses the sun rays on a single location and generates steam which is used to drive the turbines. Here’s a more detailed description of the process (from the BBC):
- The solar tower is 115m (377ft) tall and surrounded by 600 steel reflectors (heliostats). They track the sun and direct its rays to a heat exchanger (receiver) at the top of the tower
- The receiver converts concentrated solar energy from the heliostats into steam
- Steam is stored in tanks and used to drive turbines that will produce enough electricity for up to 6,000 homes
I found this article while surfing the Alternative Energy Headlines. Here are a few links to some of the other websites that picked up this story: Engadget, Gadget Lab, Global Warming Watch.
I just stumbled here through my StumbleUpon firefox extension, and I think this is a great idea! I’ve always liked the idea of alternative resources, and wish we’d have had them long ago … gasoline/oil/fossil fuels suck(s)! I wonder if all those mirrors get cleaned often to keep their efficiency? It’d be really difficult, I think, but dirty mirrors don’t reflect very well.
There’s a video floating around online somewhere (not sure of whether it’s true or not), but apparently, some dude has invented a conversion kit for his car to make it run on … WATER! It was really expensive, he says, but apparently, something inside it breaks the water down into hydrogen2 & oxygen. It uses the h2 to power it, and all that comes out of the exhaust is a little bit of air & steam.
Anyway, great post & idea for alternative fuels! wooo
Here are some of the videos I was able to find on YouTube. Maybe the one you are looking for is among them?
http://www.youtube.com/v/m_21KafrwRc
http://www.youtube.com/v/UVhXrvCCILw
http://www.youtube.com/v/L6yRn4IAsrU
Check this site :
http://top100energy.com/ the No#1 resourse for alternative energies, sorted, listed, commented.
You will like it.
Zoli.
Christopher: in case you come back…that “something” that splits the H2O into H2 and O2 is electricity, and lots of it. Essentially, if you want to run your car off water, you need a large battery bank to do it (at which point you’re better off using the batteries to power the car directly, rather than wasting energy in converting it to hydrogen). Those pesky laws of physics make it pretty well impossible to run a car purely off hydrogen. What people CAN do, though, is siphon some of the energy off their car’s normal battery to create a small amount of hydrogen from water and add it to their regular fuel as a “booster”, increasing their performance and fuel economy. You just can’t create energy from nothing, which is what water-powered cars purport.
On topic, this is a great idea. What happens at night, though?
You could just use bromine to liberate the water leaving bromine oxide and liberating hydrogen…
I also like the idea of using solar power in our days more and more. In future solar power should substitute other ways of getting energy in my opinion, because it is natural source of energy, harmless, and there are a lot of regions in the world where the sun is very bright and shines many days a year.