You may not have noticed but The US has "funded" research into solar electric plants many times.
They did so in the 50s
They did so in the 70s
They did so in the 90s
And in each case, they researched and where starting to get somewhere, and then... nothing.
The funding wasn't "cut", but somehow, the accounts were empty, bills and people weren't paid, etc.
Image of Solar Two Power Tower Project
The US built a test site called Solar two which reflected solar energy onto a tower that melted salt. This molten salt was kept in a storage tank to later be used to create steam to power an electric generator.
Sooooo, they experimented with it for a while... and then shut it down.
They never produced electricity from it on an ongoing basis.
Can you imagine building a solar power plant, never using it, and then tearing it down?
Me neither, but T.H.E.Y. did.
Turning sunlight into electricity is fairly easy, use the sunlight's heat to boil a refrigerant (water is a favorite) and use the steem pressure to turn the generators.
I have even seen house sized systems. Where they had some trough style collectors and a small steam engine. Making it large enough to support a small community is easy. Making it small enough for a single house is kind of complex. That is the reason you see solar-voltaic panels on homes; no moving parts.
But, solar-voltaic panels are quite inefficient. They only use specific light frequencies. Whereas a solar heating system uses all of the sunlight's energy. It is just more complex.
This is why, building a solar farm for a small community in desert areas would be a very excellent way to bring green energy to these kind of places.
Now, to store energy, a tried and true method is to use a height difference in water.
With the solar power you created, you pump the water from a lower storage tank to a higher storage tank. And when you need power later, you open the gate and let the water fall back down spinning the turbine. It is utter simplicity. It doesn't produce awful gasses or randomly explode like other power storage media.
There have been several attempts to build such things, but after the original hype wears off, the story is buried and we never hear from it again.. I don't see why places like Kalifornia doesn't have dozens of these things just to deal with the spike loads of ACs in the summer. I mean, Kalifornia has hundreds of little mountains next to valleys, given you a couple hundred foot drop in a small horizontal distance. Even without the solar power providing the pump, just balancing day and night loads on power plants makes it worth it.
except: Solar Two image wikia commons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solar_Project
Good Idea for power storage, I like compressed air but this would be even safer.
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There's a big one in the desert that fries birds mid-flight and it is right next to a migration path.
I was speaking of water storage tanks being used to store energy.
Kalifornia has the mountains and valleys to do that.
And yes, the power tower design has very high light intensity near the tower, that can fry a bird in an instant. But, i do not know if you are speaking of Solar Two, which was taken down, or something else they built.
The one i hear about frying birds is over in Spain.
If you were building such for a small community, i would suggest a trough reflector design, or a ... can't remember name, but a sheet of plastic that has ridges that focus the light. As you only need to boil water, so about 3x light intensity does the trick.
I would try to build a stirling engine with the reflected light.
I never like the sterling engine.
It is a great nifty device, but its not... inefficient is not the word, it just becomes troublesome to get large energy out of. As in, that big array has to be pointed directly at the sun to get an output that is less than a little generator.
The other half of the problem with sterling is you need a cold side too. And where does that come from when you are heating the air around the thing.
Boiling a refrigerant and using the steam to move a turbine or engine allows you to get more work in a smaller area. Yes, it is more complex, but it works better. You know what you need to get a pressure head, you know what that pressure differential will do. You can reliquify the refrigerant at another spot. (away from the heat collectors)
And, the ideas i am conveying are meant to power a small community.
I always envisioned sticking one half in some running water and the other half out. With today's technology, there has to be some material that could increase the temperature differences between the two sides.
Then, use touchless magnets to power a generator, to solve the torque issue.
And already, the sterling engine is getting quite complex, its simplicity, the reason for using it, diminishes.
Further, changing a liquid to a steam gives more energy out then you put in.
And yes, there are designs for a perpetual motion steam engine, if you can make each of its pieces efficient enough.
Funny enough, it is not really the difference in pressure that drives an engine. It is actually the temperature difference. So, you can say that the sterling concept applies to all engines.
I think Cody's Lab or someone put one in a vacuum chamber and it didn't run. So, if you can put it under pressure, it would also run better.
BTW, the 8-cyclinder model in the third video uses water cooling and he made it with scrap parts. And other people have already talked about using magnets to get the electricity.
Of course, they use them on nuclear subs.
10 kilowatt solar stirling generator developed back in 2001
This is the one I would want to build
Some good systems there and here in Australia and especially in the state of Tasmania we are adding pumped hydro to our already existing hydro power systems. As we have more renewable power being added as solar and windfarms. This will ad to the systems efficiency.
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Nice job. I really like the original photos you created.
Good article. You even made an additional effort by creating these images. Solar power has a huge potential. Solar electric plants will be extremely important part in generation of electric power in near future.
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