Reuters has a report on Google's latest investment plans in solar energy, this time concentrating on mirrors for solar thermal power - Google plans new mirror for cheaper solar power. Speaking of Google, my search engine traffic has almost disappeared lately, with visitor numbers plummeting over the past few weeks from an (already diminished) 1000 people per day to something closer to 300 per day - it seems Peak Energy is now well past peak (not entirely unfairly given the absence of original content in recent months, but still a little disappointing).

Google Inc is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.

"We've been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on," the company's green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Google, known for its Internet search engine, in late 2007 said it would invest in companies and do research of its own to produce affordable renewable energy within a few years.

The company's engineers have been focused on solar thermal technology, in which the sun's energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam to turn a turbine. Mirrors focus the sun's rays on the heated substance.

Weihl said Google is looking to cut the cost of making heliostats, the fields of mirrors that have to track the sun, by at least a factor of two, "ideally a factor of three or four."

"Typically what we're seeing is $2.50 to $4 a watt (for) capital cost," Weihl said. "So a 250 megawatt installation would be $600 million to a $1 billion. It's a lot of money."

That works out to 12 to 18 cents a kilowatt hour.

Google hopes to have a viable technology to show internally in a couple of months, Weihl said. It will need to do accelerated testing to show the impact of decades of wear on the new mirrors in desert conditions.

"We're not there yet," he said. "I'm very hopeful we will have mirrors that are cheaper than what companies in the space are using..."

Another technology that Google is working on is gas turbines that would run on solar power rather than natural gas, an idea that has the potential of further cutting the cost of electricity, Weihl said.

"In two to three years we could be demonstrating a significant scale pilot system that would generate a lot of power and would be clearly mass manufacturable at a cost that would give us a levelized cost of electricity that would be in the 5 cents or sub 5 cents a kilowatt hour range," Weihl said.

Google is invested in two solar thermal companies, eSolar and BrightSource, but is not working with these companies in developing the cheaper mirrors or turbines.

Renewable Energy World has an article on a plan to greatly expand the use of passive solar thermal energy in Europe - Action Plan for 50%: How Solar Thermal Can Supply Europe's Energy.

The research efforts and infrastructure needed to supply 50% of the energy for space and water heating and cooling across Europe using solar thermal energy has been set out under the aegis of the European Solar Thermal Technology Platform (ESTTP). Published in late December 2008, more than 100 experts developed the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA), which includes a deployment roadmap showing the non-technological framework conditions that will enable this ambitious goal to be reached by 2050.

A strategy for achieving a vision of widespread low-temperature solar thermal installations was first explored by ESTTP in 2006, but since then the SRA has identified key areas for rapid growth. These focus points include the development of active solar buildings, active solar renovation, solar heat for industrial processes and solar heat for district heating and cooling. Meanwhile, amongst the main research challenges is the development of compact long-term efficient heat storage technology. Once available, they would make it possible to store heat from the summer for use in winter in a cost-effective way.

The ESTTP’s main objective is to create the right conditions in order to fully exploit solar thermal’s potential for heating and cooling in Europe and worldwide. ...

Compared to other continents, Europe has the most sophisticated market for different solar thermal applications, with a relatively wide mix of different applications such as hot water preparation, space heating of single- and multi-family homes and hotels, large-scale plants for district heating as well as a several pilot systems for air conditioning, cooling and industrial applications. However, also in Europe, the majority of the new solar thermal systems are installed on residential homes for heating domestic hot water only, with solar typically providing 40%–80% of demand. Nevertheless, there is already a clear tendency towards combined systems for hot water and space heating in countries like Germany and Austria, where 50% or more of the newly installed systems are combined systems. ...

Combined energy conservation measures and increased efficiency in buildings that could slice some 40% of total heat demand would enable solar thermal systems to supply about 20% of the overall heat demand in the EU-27 by 2030.

The long-term potential of solar thermal is to provide about 50% of EU heat demand by 2050, an installed capacity of 2576 GWth or 8 m2 per inhabitant.

Renewable Energy World reports on a new solar thermal plant that has gone live in Spain, including molten salt energy storage - Andasol 1 Goes Into Operation.

The thermal energy storage system of one of Europe's first parabolic trough power plant, Andasol 1, has been successfully put into operation by Solar Millennium. The commissioning of the storage system and the turbine, along with the feeding of electricity into Spain's grid (on a test basis) will follow within the coming days. In a few weeks, Andasol 1 will then go into regular operation.

The Andasol 1 storage system absorbs part of the heat produced in the solar field during the day. A turbine produces electricity using this heat during the night, or when the sky is overcast. This process almost doubles the number of operational hours at the solar thermal power plant per year, the company said.

The heat generated in the solar field will be stored in a molten mixture of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate. Both substances are used in food production as preservatives and are also used as fertilizer. The storage tank consists of two, 14-meter high tanks with a diameter of 36 meters and a capacity of 28,500 tons of molten salt.

During the pumping process from the cold to the hot tank, the molten salt absorbs additional heat at an outlet temperature of approximately 280°C, reaching a temperature of 380°C. A fully loaded storage system can keep the turbine in operation for 7.5 hours, which means almost 24-hour operation of the power plant in during high sunshine periods.

Wired reports the US Army is planning to build a 500 MW solar thermal power plant (calling it the world's largest, though it certainly isn't the largest one being planned) - Army Looks to Build World's Strongest Solar Array.

The Army says it wants to build what could be the world's most powerful solar power plant, as part of a far-reaching effort to cut back on the service's dependence on fossil fuels. The question is whether the Army will actually make good on its green promises.

Currently, the most powerful photovoltaic array in the country is at Nellis Air Force Base, outside of Las Vegas. It generates about 15 megawatts of power. Other plants are in the works in New Mexico, Arizona and California that could produce up to 300 megawatts.

Yesterday, the Army declared that it would "partner with the private sector to construct a 500-megawatt solar thermal plant at Fort Irwin, California, in the Mojave Desert, that will provide renewable power on the grid and provide the sprawling Army post with added energy security against disruption of power supply."

The U.S. military has been making all sorts of bold declarations in recent years about the need to wean itself from fossil fuels. It is "imperative" that the Department of Defense "apply new energy technologies that address alternative supply sources and efficient consumption across all aspects of military operations," thundered one Pentagon report.

"Effectively immediately," shouted another, Pentagon planners must factor in "energy efficiency" when designing "all tactical systems." That's because the Defense Department is not only one of the world's largest consumers of oil and gas — slurping up "110 million barrels of premium fuel and 3.8 billion kilowatts of electricity at a cost of $13.6 billion," as Defense News notes. But the stuff is ridiculously expensive: War-zone fuel prices can reach up to $400 per gallon.

The military's record of answering those clarion calls has been uneven, however. For every promising, isolated effort — wind-powered bases, garbage-munching generators in Baghdad — there have been disappointments, too. Long-promised hybrid Humvees never materialized. "Urgent" pleas from battlefield commanders for green power stations were negged by the Pentagon brass.

In a statement, the Army claims this effort will be different, because it's putting in place a "Senior Energy Council to serve as a board of directors focusing on Army energy policy, programs and funding to leverage the Army's nationwide energy-conservation efforts."

I've posted plenty of stories about solar thermal power in the Sahara, a scheme long ago dubbed deserts of gold, with most of them talking about large scale CSP plants in North Africa supplying clean energy to Europe. The Guardian has a new twist on this vision, with desert CSP plants being twinned with "seawater greenhouses" that grow crops using desalinated water produced using waste heat from the power plant - Environment: Solar plant yields water and crops from the desert.

Vast greenhouses that use sea water for crop cultivation could be combined with solar power plants to provide food, fresh water and clean energy in deserts, under an ambitious proposal from a team of architects and engineers.

The Sahara Forest Project, which is already running demonstration plants in Tenerife, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, envisages huge greenhouses with concentrated solar power (CSP), a technology that uses mirrors to focus the sun's rays, creating steam to drive turbines to generate electricity.

The installations would turn deserts into lush patches of vegetation, according to its designers, and do away with the need to dig wells for fresh water, an activity that has depleted aquifers across the world.

Charlie Paton, a member of the team, and the inventor of the Seawater Greenhouse, said the scheme was a proven way to transform arid environments. "Plants need light for growth but they don't like heat beyond a certain point," he said.

Above certain temperatures the amount of water lost through leaves' stomata rises so much plants stop their photosynthesis and do not grow. The solar farm planned by the project runs seawater evaporators, pumping damp, cool air through the greenhouses. This reduces the warmth inside by about 15C, compared with the temperature outside.

At the other end of the greenhouse from the evaporators, water vapour is condensed. Some of this fresh water is used to water the crops, some for cleaning the solar mirrors.

"So we've got conditions in the greenhouse of high humidity and lower temperature," said Paton. "The crops sitting in this slightly steamy, humid condition can grow fantastically well."

The designers said that virtually any vegetables could be grown in the greenhouses. The demonstration plants already produce lettuces, peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes. The nutrients to grow the plants could come from local seaweed or be extracted from the seawater.

Michael Pawlyn, of Exploration Architecture, based in London, worked on the Eden Project for seven years and is now part of the Sahara Forest team. He said that the Seawater Greenhouse and CSP provided substantial synergies for each other. "Both technologies work extremely well in hot, dry, desert locations. CSP produces a lot of waste heat and we'd be able to use that to evaporate more seawater from the greenhouse. And CSP needs a supply of clean, de-mineralised water in order for the [electricity generating] turbines to function and to keep the mirrors at peak output. It just so happens the Seawater Greenhouse produces large quantities of this."

Paton said the greenhouse produced more than five times the fresh water needed to water the plants inside, so some of the water could be released to the outside, creating a microclimate for hardier plants such as jatropha, a crop that can be turned into biofuel.

The cost of the Sahara Forest Project could be relatively low as both CSP and Seawater Greenhouses are proven technologies. The designers estimate that building 20 hectares (nearly 50 acres) of greenhouses combined with a 10MW CSP scheme would cost about €80m (£65m).

Paton said groups in countries across the Middle East, including in UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait, have expressed interest in possibly funding demonstration projects.

He said use of Seawater Greenhouses could reverse the environmental damage done by the glasshouses already built in places such as the desert region of Almeria, southern Spain, where, constructed over the past 20 years to grow salad crops, they now covered more than 40,000 hectares.

Paton said: "They take water out of the ground something like five times faster than it comes in, so the water table drops and becomes more saline. The whole of Spain is being sucked dry. If one were to convert them all to the Seawater Greenhouse concept it would turn an unsustainable solution into a more sustainable one."

Pawlyn said: "In places like Oman they've effectively sterilised large areas of land by using groundwater that's become increasingly saline. The beauty of the Sahara Forest scheme is that you can reverse that process and turn barren land into biologically productive land."

Neil Crumpton, an energy specialist at Friends of the Earth, said the potential of these desert technologies was huge. "Concentrated solar power mirror arrays covering just 1% of the Earth's deserts could supply a fifth of all current global energy consumption. And 1 million tonnes of sea water could be evaporated every day from just 20,000ha of greenhouses."

Governments should invest in the technologies and "not be distracted by lobbyists promoting dangerous nuclear power or nuclear-powered desalination schemes", Crumpton added.

The International Energy Agency estimates that the world needs to invest more than $45 trillion (£22.5 trillion) in new energy systems over the next 30 years.

As solar thermal power is probably my favoured form of large scale clean energy, I was very pleased to see today's press on a plan by Worley Parsons to build the world's largest CSP plant in Australia - a 8.5 GW plant in the Pilbara - something I've suggested here a few times, due to the concentration of industry in the area and the world leading solar insolation levels.

The Business Spectator reports - Dream solar system.

So much for those hoary old arguments that Australia could not possibly meet an ambitious renewable energy target of 20 per cent by 2020.

Australian engineering firm WorleyParsons has unveiled an ambitious project to build up to 34 solar thermal power stations that could provide 10 per cent of the country’s energy needs by 2020.

The $34 billion project – each station could cost around $1 billion – would meet half of the 20 per cent renewable energy target that has been set by the Rudd Government for 2020 and could provide significantly more over time.

WorleyParsons hopes that the first solar thermal plant – using proven parabolic mirror technology in use in California for the pasts 20 years – could be built in Australia by 2011. Other solar thermal technologies would also be considered over time.

Peter Meurs, who heads the project, says each plant would be a "utility” sized installation of around 250Mw, the size of many gas and coal fired stations, and would most likely produce electricity at a cost of 15c per kilowatt hour.

Meurs says the technology is ideal to meet Australia’s “peak energy” requirements, the daylight hours when energy use surges as air conditioners and the like are turned on. “The generators used in solar thermal are the same as coal fired generators,” he says. “They provide reliable power from when the sun comes up in the morning to when the sun goes down at night.”

Solar thermal can also store energy for 24 hours or more, but the costs rise significantly in those circumstances. Meurs says this is why solar thermal is best used with a base-load source such as coal, gas, or geothermal when the technology emerges.

While WorleyParsons has brought together a consortium to consider the project and is conducting the feasibility studies, it will not be an investor in the project. This it will leave to consortium members including the likes of BHP, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers, Delta Electricity, Woodside and Fortescue Metals.

Meurs says the project would not be feasible without the renewable energy target, noting that California and Spain had both generated large investments in solar thermal because of either renewable energy targets or generous feed in tariffs.

He says a carbon price would also help, although a minimum price per tonne had not yet been identified. “At around $10 investors would not be too enthusiastic. $20 is better, and $50 is a very strong signal.”

Meurs says Australia has the opportunity to become a world leader in solar thermal technology through the development, design, manufacture and operation of solar-thermal plants. As well as expertise in grid integration. “We are at a tipping point for solar power.”

The Age's take - Worley profit up 53%, mulls solar plant.

WorleyParsons Ltd, Australia's largest engineering company, says the Pilbara region of Western Australia could be a location for a $1 billion thermal solar power station. The company made the comments after delivering a record profit for 2007/08 of $343.9 million, up 53 per cent on the previous 12 months to June 30. It said the fiscal 2008 result was underpinned by acquisitions and strong demand for its oil and gas, and metals and minerals services.

WorleyParsons said commodity demand from China and India remained strong but the full extent of volatile economic conditions on the project development sector was unknown. Despite the caution, the engineering group said the outlook for its minerals and metals division remained positive this year.

The company launched a proposal Tuesday to build a 34 250-megawatt solar power station in Australia by 2020 with technology used in the United States over the past 20 years. Nine groups, including Rio Tinto Ltd, BHP Billiton Ltd and Fortescue Metals Group Ltd, are funding a study to examine the potential development of the power stations.

The ABC reports that the proposal has been greeted enthusiastically - Aust firm unveils plans to build 'world's biggest solar plant' .

The Managing Director of Worley Parson's sustainability arm, Peter Meurs, says the search will focus on desert locations. "The ideal location for a thermal solar power station is a desert type location, you want maximum solar with the least cloud cover or interference and our dry desert locations are ideal," he said.

The Greens say the decision is an acknowledgment that clean coal technology is not achievable.

Green's Climate Change spokeswoman, Christine Milne says it is a big boost for the renewable energy sector and should be supported by the Federal Government. "This is really an acknowledgment that clean coal is never going to be achievable and the coal industry itself is leapfrogging clean coal and recognising the power of renewable energy and solar thermal in particular," she said.

The Business Spectator has a look at the bright prospects for solar thermal power in the US - assuming the fossil fuel industry doesn't manage to kill it off - Sunny prospects.

Solar energy is often labelled too expensive and too unreliable to be considered a solution to the world’s clean energy challenge. But there is a growing acceptance that that is no longer the case, which is why the US fossil fuel industry is mounting such a ferocious challenge to the proposed extension of tax credits to the solar industry by the US Congress.

A bill to extend what is known as the Investment Tax Credit for another eight years has been brought to a standstill by the Republican Party, which is under intense pressure from the fossil fuel lobby to block the bill, or at least negotiate a compromise that allows the lobby to drill in previously inaccessible areas in the US.

The debate has drawn in Barack Obama, who on Monday lambasted presidential rival John McCain and his fellow Republicans for trying to “drill their way” out of the energy crisis. Even the most famous driller of them all, the Texan oil man T Boone Pickens, agreed with Obama and called for the renewable energy tax incentives to be passed.

The level of concern from the fossil fuel industry about the emergence of solar thermal – along with other renewables – is not hard to understand. After more than a decade of hibernation caused by cheap coal and oil and a lack of government initiatives to support solar thermal, the industry is experiencing a surge of investment and its prospects look compelling.

In 2007, 100Mw of new solar thermal capacity came online across the world, the start of a rollout that is expected to add another 5,600Mw over the next four years in the US and Spain alone. If the current growth levels are maintained, by 2020, global capacity could reach 200,000Mw – equivalent to four times Australia’s current power generation capacity, or 135 coal-fired power plants.

According to David Mills, the former University of New South Wales research scientist who moved to California in 2006 to establish his company Ausra with the help of private backing, solar thermal could replace 90 percent of fossil fuel-generated electricity in the US, and most of the oil used for transport. And, he says, it could be done for less than it would cost to continue importing oil.

A separate study published in the magazine Scientific American this year suggests solar could account for more than two thirds of US electricity and more than one third of its transport energy needs.

Ausra recently signed an agreement with California’s Pacific Gas and Electricity to develop 77Mw of solar thermal power – enough to power 120,000 homes – by 2011. Within six months it expects to have contracts for 1,000Mw of solar thermal power, and negotiations are continuing for a further 5,000Mw.

Celsias has a look at a new Fresnel lens based CSP (solar thermal) technology originating in Utah from a company called IAUS - Utah's Solar Fired Furnace to Power California for Less Than the Cost of Coal or Gas.

In an arid region of the western U.S. known as the Great Basin, the desert floor has recently been reaching temperatures in excess of 1,300 degrees Farenheit. No, this isn't due to global warming, but perhaps part of the solution to it. A Utah based company called IAUS (International Automated Systems Inc.) has developed a solar lens technology that transmits solar energy with an efficiency of 92%.

A California energy consortium has invested in the first stage of the project. Twenty specially designed solar towers are being erected close to the Great Basin in Delta, Utah. Each tower holds four solar lenses that follow the sun as it crosses the clear blue desert sky. Each lens will focus the sun's rays onto specially designed heat exchangers that will convert the solar energy to super-heated steam. The heat exchangers double as high-efficiency turbines that will drive electrical generators to produce alternating current output.

Later stages will involve placing 1000 towers over 700 acres of desert. With each tower having a capacity to produce 100 kW of power, the entire field stands to produce close to 100 MW of power when finished. That's enough energy to power 50,000 average Californian homes. Once generated, the power will travel around five miles to be integrated with the U.S. national power grid.

The key to the success of the project are the unique thin-film solar lenses. Lenses of this size are typically heavy and expensive to produce. IAUS have developed a technique of embedding magnifying material into cheap, light, rolled plastic. The plastic is composited into extremely large Fresnel lenses. The lenses are light, relatively cheap to manufacture and easy to maintain. This compares favourably with traditional solar collectors.

The plant is located in one of the best solar locations in the country due to its high altitude and thin air. Solar energy is absorbed as it travels through our atmosphere, so placing a solar energy plant in a rarefied environment allows more solar radiation to be captured. IAUS also point out that the land on which the final solar plant is to be situated is one tenth the price of equivalent land in California. Combined with the comparatively inexpensive cost of the plant equipment, this means that the entire facility would cost roughly half of what a coal fired power plant would cost to construct.

The Guardian had a good article a couple of years ago about CSP in North Africa supplying power to Europe which I dubbed "Deserts of Gold".

Obviously this institutional knowledge hasn't been passed down as the latest version of this story is far weaker and confuses solar thermal power with solar PV. Still, good to see the idea is gaining momentum - £37bn plan to power EU with the Saharan sun.

Vast farms of solar panels in the Sahara could provide clean electricity for the whole of Europe, according to EU scientists working on a plan to pool the region's renewable energy.

Harnessing the power of the desert sun is at the centre of an ambitious scheme to build a €45bn (£35.7bn) European supergrid that would allow countries across the continent to share electricity from abundant green sources such as wind energy in the UK and Denmark, and geothermal energy from Iceland and Italy.

The idea is gaining political support in Europe, with Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, recently backing the north African solar plan.

Because the sunlight is more intense, solar photovoltaic panels in north Africa could generate up to three times the electricity compared with similar panels in northern Europe.

Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission's Institute for Energy explained how electricity produced in solar farms in Africa, each generating around 50-200 megawatts of power, could be fed thousands of miles to European countries. The proposed grid would use high-voltage direct current (DC) transmission lines, which lose less energy over distance than conventional alternating current (AC) lines.

The idea of developing solar farms in the Mediterranean region and north Africa was given a boost by Sarkozy earlier this month when he highlighted solar farms in north Africa as central to the work of his newly formed Mediterranean Union.

Depending on the size of the grid, building the necessary high-voltage lines across Europe could cost up to €1bn a year every year till 2050, but Jaeger-Walden pointed out that the figure was small when compared to a recent prediction by the International Energy Agency that the world needs to invest more than $45tn (£22.5tn) in energy systems over the next 30 years.

Articles about solar thermal power are becoming more prevalent in the mainstream media - here is a good example from the North Denver News - Solar Thermal Energy coming to a boil - Peak Oil.

Using CSP plants to power electric vehicles could further reduce CO2 emissions and provide strategic advantages by relaxing dependence on oil. In Israel, a tender issued by the Ministry for National Infrastructures for the construction of CSP plants and a 19.4¢ per kilowatt-hour feed-in tariff for solar power systems are sparking interest in developing up to 250 megawatts of CSP in the Negev Desert. This would produce enough electricity to run the 100,000 electric cars that Project Better Place, a company focused on building an electric personal transportation system, is planning to put on Israeli roads by the end of 2010.

A study by Ausra, a solar energy company based in California, indicates that over 90 percent of fossil fuel–generated electricity in the United States and the majority of U.S. oil usage for transportation could be eliminated using solar thermal power plants--and for less than it would cost to continue importing oil. The land requirement for the CSP plants would be roughly 15,000 square miles (38,850 square kilometers, the equivalent of 15 percent of the land area of Nevada). While this may sound like a large tract, CSP plants use less land per equivalent electrical output than large hydroelectric dams when flooded land is included, or than coal plants when factoring in land used for coal mining. Another study, published in Scientific American in January 2008, proposes using CSP and PV plants to produce 69 percent of U.S. electricity and 35 percent of total U.S. energy, including transportation, by 2050.

CSP plants on less than 0.3 percent of the desert areas of North Africa and the Middle East could generate enough electricity to meet the needs of these two regions plus the European Union. Realizing this, the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation--an initiative of The Club of Rome, the Hamburg Climate Protection Foundation, and the National Energy Research Center of Jordan--conceived the DESERTEC Concept in 2003. This plan to develop a renewable energy network to transmit power to Europe from the Middle East and North Africa calls for 100,000 megawatts of CSP to be built throughout the Middle East and North Africa by 2050. Electricity delivery to Europe would occur via direct current transmission cables across the Mediterranean. Taking the lead in making the concept a reality, Algeria plans to build a 3,000-kilometer cable between the Algerian town of Adrar and the German city of Aachen to export 6,000 megawatts of solar thermal power by 2020.

If the projected annual growth rate of CSP through 2012 is maintained to 2020, global installed CSP capacity would exceed 200,000 megawatts--equivalent to 135 coal-fired power plants. With billions of dollars beginning to flow into the CSP industry and U.S. restrictions on carbon emissions imminent, CSP is primed to reach such capacity.

There were a couple of small Australian solar power projects that I left out of my look at solar thermal power a little while ago, as I thought they were worthy of separate consideration.

The first of these is being put together by a South Australian company called Wizard Power, which is trying to commercialise research from the Australian National University (ANU) - a solar concentrator dish and a closed loop thermochemical energy storage system using ammonia.

Most solar thermal projects use molten salt or water to store energy in the form of heat, as will another Australian solar thermal plant that uses graphite as the storage medium.

Like other solar thermal companies (Ausra being the highest profile example), Wizard is touting the coupling of energy storage with solar power as a "baseload power" solution, with the goal for the new plant being to provide power 24 hours a day to the South Australian town of Whyalla.

Wizard plans to start construction of a demonstration plant in October and to begin generating power from July 2009. Six concentrator dishes will be built on land opposite the OneSteel steelworks, which receives an average of 301 days of sunshine each year.

The demonstration plant was funded with an Australian Greenhouse Office grant of $7.4 million as part of the Advanced Electricity Storage Technologies programme, and the plant may be expanded if the technology is proven.

There have been reports that an associated company, Wizard IT, has gone into receivership, but apparently this does not impact the Wizard Power organisation.

The ANU describes the "closed loop thermochemical energy storage using ammonia" process as :

n this system, ammonia (NH3) is dissociated in an energy storing (endothermic) chemical reactor as it absorbs solar thermal energy. At a later time and place, the reaction products hydrogen (H2) and nitrogen (N2) react in an energy releasing (exothermic) reactor to resynthesise ammonia.

2 NH3 + Heat <---> N2 + 3 H2

A fixed amount of reactants (ammonia, nitrogen and hydrogen) are contained in a closed loop, and pass alternately between energy storing and energy releasing reactors with provision for storage of reactants in between. Because the solar energy is stored in a chemical form at ambient temperature, there are zero energy losses in the store regardless of the length of time that the reactants remain in storage. The reactors are packed with standard commercial catalyst materials to promote both reactions. Counter-flow heat exchangers transfer heat between in-going and out-going reactants at each reactor to use the energy most effectively.

Feeding the reactors with pure reactants is possible through the natural separation of reactants and products in the storage system: at the pressures applied, ammonia condenses.

By ensuring that the stuff leaving each reactor transfers its own thermal energy (sensible heat) to the stuff going in - using heat exchangers - most of the solar energy is stored in the change in composition of the chemicals which are kept at ambient temperature.

The advantages of this energy storage mechanism are identified as:

* A high energy storage density, by volume and mass.
* The reactions are easy to control and to reverse and there are no unwanted side reactions.
* All constituents involved are environmentally benign.
* There exists a history of industrial application with the associated available expertise and hardware.
* A readily achievable turning temperature of 400oC to 500oC (depending on the pressure). This helps to reduce thermal losses from dish receivers, avoids some high temperature materials limitations, and allows lower quality (and hence cheaper) dish optics to be used.
* All reactants for transport and handling are in the fluid phase, which provides a convenient means of energy transport without thermal loss.
* At ambient temperature the ammonia component of reactant mixtures condenses to form a liquid, whilst the nitrogen and hydrogen remains as a gas. This means that only one storage vessel is required for reactants and products.

There is also a possibility of using the low grade heat left after power generation for secondary applications such as desalination.

I haven't been able to find any comparisons of thermochemical energy storage to other storage mechanisms, so its hard to e certain how much of a boost (if any) this process gives compared to the alternatives.

Dr Keith Lovegrove from ANU mentioned some details regarding the solar dishes used in a talk on "Concentrating On Solar Thermal as a Solution to Climate Change" at the "Zero Emission" Conference in Melbourne last year.

A quick comment on why ANU advocates dishes, rather than other alternatives. Essentially if you go through the numbers, we pick up a higher optical efficiency and higher thermal efficiency in the receiver and that also propagates through. Our turbines will be the same as anyone else’s turbines but at the end of the day, we think we’ll get twice the electrical output per area of mirror. So that’s just in case you’re following that route. ...

Where is solar thermal power going? I think we can learn from the wind industry. It’s very similar. It’s about manufacturing, the use of steel and glass and not rocket science. Wind industry has grown exponentially and costs have declined. And we can expect the same. ...

Here’s a thought. We could actually export solar energy. How would we do that? Well, we would do that by using, for example, solar thermal systems can gasify biomass and even, dare I say it, gasified coal, in which case the final energy content is a mixture of solar and fossils. You can synthesise all that stuff into methanol and ship it overseas and quite literally power Japan, given that they’re 40% dependent on Middle Eastern oil at the moment and not very happy about that. It’s quite conceivable to imagine Australia as an exporter of solar energy.

I'll close with a quote from Thomas Edison back in 1910 (Source: Interview in Elbert Hubbard's Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great):

Some day some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing up sunshine to use instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire. I'll do the trick myself if some one else doesn't get at it. Why, that is all there is about my work in electricity--you know, I never claimed to have invented electricity--that is a campaign lie--nail it!

Sunshine is spread out thin and so is electricity. Perhaps they are the same, but we will take that up later. Now the trick was, you see, to concentrate the juice and liberate it as you needed it. The old-fashioned way inaugurated by Jove, of letting it off in a clap of thunder, is dangerous, disconcerting and wasteful. It doesn't fetch up anywhere. My task was to subdivide the current and use it in a great number of little lights, and to do this I had to store it. And we haven't really found out how to store it yet and let it off real easy-like and cheap. Why, we have just begun to commence to get ready to find out about electricity. This scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of--it is so wasteful. It is just the old, foolish Prometheus idea, and the father of Prometheus was a baboon."

When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy. Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property.

There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces. Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen, for it can not be destroyed. Now, I am not sure but that my new storage-battery is the thing. I'd tell you about that, but I don't want to bore you...

Jospeh Romm is obviously getting enthusiastic about solar thermal power, with an article in Salon glowingly titled "The technology that will save humanity". Some notes and discussion follow at Grist.

One of oldest forms of energy used by humans -- sunlight concentrated by mirrors -- is poised to make an astonishing comeback. I believe it will be the most important form of carbon-free power in the 21st century. That's because it's the only form of clean electricity that can meet all the demanding requirements of this century.

Certainly we will need many different technologies to stop global warming. They include electric cars and plug-in hybrids, wind turbines and solar photovoltaics, which use sunlight to make electricity from solid-state materials like silicon semiconductors. Yet after speaking with energy experts and seeing countless presentations on all forms of clean power, I believe the one technology closest to being a silver bullet for global warming is the other solar power: solar thermal electric, which concentrates the sun's rays to heat a fluid that drives an electric generator. It is the best source of clean energy to replace coal and sustain economic development. I bet that it will deliver more power every year this century than coal with carbon capture and storage -- for much less money and with far less environmental damage.

Clearly, the world needs a massive amount of carbon-free electricity by 2050 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions. The industrialized countries need to cut their carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by more than 80 percent in four decades. Developing countries need to find a way to raise living standards without increasing electricity emissions in the short term, and then reduce those emissions sharply. And, over the next few decades, the world needs to switch to a ground transportation system whose primary fuel is clean electricity.

This electricity must meet a number of important criteria. It must be affordable: New electricity generation should cost at most about 10 cents per kilowatt hour, a price that would probably beat nuclear power and would certainly beat coal with carbon capture and storage, if the latter even proves practical on a large scale. The electricity cannot be intermittent and hard to store, as is energy from wind power and solar photovoltaics. We need power that either stays constant day and night or, even better, matches electricity demand, which typically rises in the morning, peaks in the late afternoon, and lasts late into the evening.

This carbon-free electricity must provide thousands of gigawatts of power and make use of a low-cost fuel that has huge reserves accessible to both industrialized and developing countries. It should not make use of much freshwater or arable land, which are likely to be scarce in a climate-changed world with 3 billion more people.

Solar electric thermal, also known as concentrated solar power (CSP), meets all these criteria.

EcoGeek points to this excellent example of an industrial use of solar thermal technology at the Materials Sceince Insitute in Parkent, Uzbekistan. The concentrator unit can apparently generate 1 MW of power (according to this UPI report) though it is usually referred to as a "solar furnace" which sounds more like the heat is used directly.

Apparently it used to be used for testing missile components, but is now used for exotic ceramics production (or melting Aluminium, according to the EcoGeek story).

While we spend a lot of time talking about traditional energy sources based on depleting resources that are extracted from the ground, I think its important to remember that the fastest growing sources of energy are solar and wind, and that these will never run out. As M King Hubbert put it regarding solar power in particular:

The biggest source of energy on this earth, now or ever, is solar. I used to think it was so diffuse as to be impractical. But I’ve changed my mind. It’s not impractical…This technology exists right now. So if we just convert the technology and research and facilities of the oil and gas industries, the chemical industry and the electrical power industry—we could do it tomorrow. All we’ve got to do is throw our weight into it.

Both Stuart Staniford's recent "Powering Civilization to 2050" post and (to a lesser extent) Scientific American's "Solar Grand Plan" concentrated on using photovoltaic solar cells to provide the bulk of our energy needs. While both thin film and traditional silicon based PV cells seem to set new efficiency records every couple of months (a CIGS cell recently reached 19.9% efficiency in lab tests, and multi-crystalline silicon PV cells recently reached 19.5% efficiency), the most promising mechanism for large scale solar power generation seems to be solar thermal power (often referred to as concentrating solar power, or CSP).



While this subject has been covered previously at TOD (from a slightly UK-centric viewpoint), I thought it was worth revisiting as solar thermal power has received a lot of press attention lately, as experience with generating power in this way grows and the potential becomes clearer to a larger number of parties.

History

Concentrated sunlight has been used to perform useful tasks for many centuries. A legend claims Archimedes used polished shields to concentrate sunlight on a Roman fleet to repel them from Syracuse in 212 BC. Leonardo Da Vinci considered using large scale solar concentrators to weld copper in the 15th century. Auguste Mouchout successfully powered a steam engine with sunlight in 1866 - the first known example of a concentrating solar-powered mechanical device.

Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) systems use lenses or mirrors combined with tracking systems to focus sunlight which is then used to generate electricity. The primary mechanisms for concentrating sunlight are the parabolic trough, the solar power tower (not to be confused with solar updraft towers) and the parabolic dish. The high temperatures produced by CSP systems can also be used to provide heat and steam for a variety of applications (cogeneration). CSP technologies require direct sunlight (insolation) to function and are of limited use in locations with significant cloud cover.

Solar thermal power plants have been in commercial use in southern California since 1985. An area of desert around 250 km by 250 km covered with CSP power generation could supply all the world's current electricity demand.



Solar thermal plants can be built in their entirety within a few years - much faster than many conventional power projects. Solar thermal plants are built almost entirely with modular, commodity materials (and thus have short development and construction times) and do not encounter the sort of opposition on environmental grounds that traditional forms of power generation like coal and nuclear face.

Operational plants include :

* US (California) - 354 MW FPL's Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) plant, using parabolic troughs
* US (Arizona) - 1 MW Acciona Energy's Saguaro Solar Generating Station using parabolic troughs
* Spain (Seville) - 11 MW Abengoa's PS10 solar tower
* Australia (NSW) - 35 MW Liddell Power Station using fresnel reflectors
* US (Nevada) - 64 MW Acciona Energy's Nevada Solar One plant (not to be confused with the Solar One / Solar Two experimental plants) using parabolic troughs



Plants currently under construction :

* Spain (Seville) - 20 MW Abengoa's PS20 solar tower
* Spain (Seville) - 20 MW (each) Abengoa's PS20 and AZ20 solar towers
* Spain (Seville) - 50 MW (each) Abengoa's Solnova 1 and 3 using parabolic troughs (5 plants planned in all)
* Spain (Andalusia) - 17 MW Sener's Solar Tres solar tower (molten salt energy storage)
* Spain (Andalusia) - 50 MW (each) Sener's Andasol I, II and III plants (molten salt energy storage)



Solar Thermal Heating Up

There has been a spate of new announcements regarding solar thermal power over the past year - there are over 5,800 MW of solar thermal plants in the planning stages worldwide.

The company receiving the most attention seems to be Ausra, a company set up by Dr David Mills (who pioneered the CSP plant at the Liddell power plant in New South Wales using compact linear Fresnel-reflector technology) with backing from Vinod Khosla and Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers (see here for a brief demo of how their technology works). Mills estimates that solar thermal plants could provide more than 90 percent of current U.S. power demand at prices competitive with coal and natural gas. "There's almost no limit to how much you can put into the grid," he says.

Mills presented a paper (pdf) at the IEA SolarPACES conference in Las Vegas recently which revealed some interesting statistics about the construction cost of solar-thermal technologies: US$3,000 per kW of capacity, estimating this will drop to US$1,500 per kW over the next "several" years. The New York Times last year quoted GE Energy executives estimating coal plant construction between US$2,000 and US$3,000 per kW. Ausra says it can generate electricity for 10 cents per kWh (close to the current cost using natural gas), and it expects the price to drop even further.

According to Technology Review:

What distinguishes Ausra's design is its relative simplicity. In conventional solar-thermal plants such as Solel's, a long trough of parabolic mirrors focuses sunlight on a tube filled with a heat-transfer fluid, often some sort of oil or brine. The fluid, in turn, produces steam to drive a turbine and produce electricity. Ausra's solar collectors employ mass-produced and thus cheaper flat mirrors, and they focus light onto tubes filled with water, thus directly producing steam. Ausra's collectors produce less power, but that power costs less to produce.

Ausra is initially planning a 177 MW plant in California, and has committed to supply 1,500 MW of power to Californian utilities PG&E and FPL. They are also rumoured to be moving in to Texas as well.

PG&E have also signed a 25-year deal with Ausra competitor Solel Solar Systems of Israel to buy power from a 553 MW solar thermal plant that Solel is developing in California's Mojave Desert. FPL has also hired Solel to upgrade the SEGS solar-thermal plants it operates in the Mojave.

Another PG&E contract is with BrightSource to supply between 500 MW and 900 MW of power per year from solar tower plants in California, beginning in 2011, with the first of a number of 100 MW facilities being built in Ivanpah.

Other companies active in the US include eSolar (linked to Google's energy initiatives), RocketDyne and SkyFuel.

Abu Dhabi's Masdar Initiative and Spain's Sener are have formed a joint venture to build and operate concentrating solar power plants across the world's sunbelt regions called Torresol Energy.



Independently of Torresol, Masdar is developing its 100 MW "Shams 1" CSP plant in Abu Dhabi.

Algeria and Germany have signed a a joint research agreement for the development of a new generation of large-scale, low-cost solar thermal power plants (which could contribute to the Desert-TREC vision of large scale CSP in North Africa powering Europe).

More new plants are being planned in :

* Algeria - 20 MW Abengoa's plant in Hassi-R'Mel
* Australia - 10 MW Queensland State Government facility in Cloncurry
* Australia - 154 MW Solar Systems and TRUEnergy's plant in Mildura
* Egypt - 70 MW plant in Kuraymat
* Iran - 17 MW plant in Yazd
* Israel - 250 MW plant in Ashalim
* Morocco - 20 MW Abengoa's plant in Ain-Ben-Mathar
* US (Arizona) - 280 MW Abengoa and Arizona Public Service's plant in Gila Bend
* US (California) - 50 MW Inland Energy's plant in Victorville
* US (California) - 250 MW FPL Energy's Beacon Solar Energy Project

Feasibility studies are also being done in Oman, China and Mexico.

Energy Storage

One of the key differentiating factors between solar thermal power and solar PV is that heat energy is more easily (and efficiently) stored than electricity, with solar thermal plants often combining energy storage into the design to enable around-the-clock, dispatchable electricity generation.

Most solar thermal plants are looking to use molten salt for storing energy - other alternatives being developed are graphite (in the Cloncurry development), heated water / steam (for the Ausra plants) and heat-transfer oil such as therminol (for the Abengoa plant in Arizona).

Cost

The existing plants prove that concentrated solar power is practical, but costs must decrease. Electricity from solar thermal plants currently costs between US$0.13 per kilowatt hour (kWh) and US$0.17 per kWh, depending on the location of the plant and the amount of sunshine it receives. Conventional power plants generate electricity for between US$0.05 and US$0.15 per kilowatt hour (not including any carbon taxes or cap and trade related costs) but in most places it's below US$0.10 (wind power generally costs around US$0.08 per kWh).

An economic analysis released last month by Severin Borenstein (pdf), director of the University of California's Energy Institute, notes that solar thermal power will become cost competitive with other forms of power generation decades before photovoltaics will, even if greenhouse-gas emissions are not taxed aggressively.

In 2006 a report by the Solar Task Force (pdf) of the Western Governors’ Association concluded that CSP could provide electricity at US$0.10 per kWh or less by 2015 if 4 GW of plants were constructed.

According to Bernhard Milow from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) electricity from solar thermal plants could cost as little as €0.04 per kWh [US $0.06/kWh] by 2020, with well sited plants potentially generating power at lower prices than coal.

The US DOE began supporting large scale CSP last year, aiming to reduce the cost of CSP power to 7-10¢/kWh by 2015 and 5-7¢/kWh by 2020. The DOE estimated that reaching these cost targets could lead to installation of up to 35,000 MW of new generating capacity by 2030 in the US. James Fraser at The Energy Blog commented at the time that it was 5 years too late (given recent commercial activity in the area) and that PV solar may beat these price goals before solar thermal does, but that more solar options are good in any case, as both PV and thin film solar manufacturing will be constrained by availability for materials for some time as production continues to accelerate.

Another estimate from Sandia labs showed solar thermal costs (for solar towers) could fall to around 4 cents per kWh by 2030.



Stirling Engines

Another variant on the solar thermal power theme are Stirling engine based power plants, which generate electricity directly rather than first storing the energy as heat.

Stirling Energy Systems seems to be the leader in this field, with some reports talking about agreements with Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric for up to 1.75 GW of power. The company recently set a new world record of 31.25% for Solar-to-Grid conversion efficiency.

Other companies pursuing stirling engine based solutions are Infinia and SunPower (not to be confused with its larger namesake in the PV industry).



Passive Solar Thermal - Solar Hot Water And Others

Generating power isn't the only way to utilise solar thermal energy of course - solar hot water is a very cheap and efficient way of replacing gas or electricity usage with solar energy. Solar hot water systems are in widespread use in Australia, with state and federal governments encouraging people to upgrade their home hot water systems to solar - almost cost free in some states. The New Zealand government is also encouraging the use of solar hot water systems.

Some larger scale uses of solar thermal hot water are being put in place by Abengoa in Texas and Colorado.

Solar hot water is in wide use in China as well, with the city of Rizhao becoming somewhat famous for achieving widespread takeup of the units.

An unusual variation of the direct capture of solar energy in the form of heat is from a Dutch company that has developed a "Road Energy System" that siphons heat from roads and parking lots to heat offices and homes.

And one final use of solar thermal power - it can keep your house warm, if your windows face the right way, and even better, have insulating glass that doesn't let the heat out again - which could help make your building energy positive.

Ausra's David Mills has been promoting solar thermal power as the answer to all our energy needs (when coupled with large scale energy storage). While this is theoretically true, I suspect once we've completed the transition to 100% clean energy solar thermal will supply maybe half the required energy - with PV (especially thin film) and a range of other renewables making up the rest.

"I took it as a theoretical presentation – what in theory could one do if you were starting from scratch," said Tom Fair from Nevada Power's renewable energy program. Fair was discussing the presentation David Mills, CEO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ausra, gave at the International Energy Agency's SolarPACES solar research conference in Las Vegas, Nev.

Mills said that over 90 percent of the nation's electricity, and most of the transportation sector's energy needs, could be supplied by solar thermal technology within the next 50 years. The study is available here. It's possible from a technology standpoint, Fair told Cleantech.com. "Deploying everything in that timepoint is obviously a challenge," he said. "There's still a lot of infrastructure in electricity and transportation that would need to be replaced."

One of the key improvements that would need to be made is in storage. Mills said the solar thermal plants would need just 16 hours of storage to continuously generate electricity. Fair said Mills' idea was "a really great target to shoot for. We'd like to see it become commercially viable."

Nevada Power is getting some of its energy from renewable sources, including a 64 megawatt solar thermal plant and a 12 MW photovoltaic plant. A geothermal power plant is expected to supply another 18 to 30 MW to the company's customers. Ausra itself has a manufacturing plant in Las Vegas that is expected to go online next month. ...

One of the storage technologies currently being used is molten salts, which must maintain a temperature above 200 degrees Celsius to continuously provide energy. Keeping the molten salts from freezing without taking energy from the grid is a hurdle, said Jenkins-Stark.

The solar day is now 24 hours long, according to John O'Donnell, Ausra's executive vice president. He said Spanish solar thermal power station Andasol is currently running 24-7 and has a 16-hour storage reservoir.

One of the factors in Mills' paper that makes the storage viable is using an oversized solar field – this allows some of the energy collected during the day to keep the electricity generation process running all night long as well, at no extra storage cost. The biggest thing about Mills' work, O'Donnell said, is that it proposes a path forward "where there's no cost increase."

The correlations Mills found between electricity load and seasonal changes suggest that the notion of using solar thermal power for the whole nation within a few decades is viable.

"We can move to an all-renewable future with the technologies commercially available right now," O'Donnell added. "It's more a matter of mobilization and deployment."

Richard Caputo, a director on the board of the San Diego Renewable Energy Society, said making Mills' proposal a reality would require more high voltage DC lines to carry the electricity from the southwestern U.S. to the rest of the country. It's an investment that would have to be made, he said, but not necessarily now.

"When you think the future and you think renewables, you start building it within two decades so it'll be ready in four decades," he said. "After World War II, the country decided it needed a national road system. Now's the time to decide we need a national electric system."

Erick Schonfeld at TechChrunch has a post on solar energy company Infinia and their Stirling Engine based technology.

If you thought clean energy financings were hot last year, 2008 promises to be scorching. Case in point: Infinia today raised a $50 million series B, led by British hedge fund GLG partners. Existing investors Equus, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gross’ Idealab, and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital also participated in the round (after putting in $9.5 million just last June).

Infinia has developed utility-scale renewable energy technology that combines a Stirling engine with a large solar collector. The Stirling engine, a technology that’s been around since the 19th century, converts the heat into electricity. Infinia used to be called Stirling Cycles, and has been around for more than two decades. It has designed Stirling engines as power sources for NASA missions, implantable artificial hearts, and cooling devices that the army uses in Iraq. Now, it is focussed exclusively on using the technology to create 14-foot diameter solar collectors that can generate 3.5 kilowatts of energy apiece. Gang together 50 or 100 (at about $20,000 a pop) and you have the energy producing capacity of a small power plant.

Infinia’s Stirling engine is powered by a free-moving piston that requires no lubricants, and thus no maintenance. “What makes this unique is the no-maintenance profile,” says chief financial officer, Gregg Clevenger, “the ability to deploy a Stirling engine out in the desert and it is engineered to run for 20 years without you having to do anything.” It is also designed to be assembled with common mass-produced parts that an auto-parts supplier could manufacture. Getting the cost down is the key to creating a technology that is competitive with other forms of energy.

Using its Stirling engine technology, Inifnia thinks it can eventually produce electricity 20 to 30 percent cheaper than today’s existing solar panels. And in times of peak energy demand—on a hot summer day, for instance—it could even be competitive with electricity from gas-powered or coal-fired plants.

Greentech Media has some notes on competition in the solar thermal market (good to see Gunther Portfolio getting a plug there).

When it comes to providing solar system technology on mass scale, Infinia is far from alone.

Companies like Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ausra, also are in the race. In December, Ausra said it was building the world's largest factory for solar-thermal power systems in Las Vegas (see Ausra to Build World's Largest Solar-Thermal Factory).

Unlike Infinia, Ausra's technology uses fields of mirrors to heat water into steam, which is then converted into electricity using a standard steam turbine.

And others have turned to a type of concentrating solar that takes sunlight from a larger area and uses lenses or glass to direct and concentrate it onto smaller solar cells.

In January, Mountain View, Calif.-based SolFocus installed its first array of solar cells in what will be a 3-megawatt project in Spain. And Germany's Concentrix Solar installed 12 of its solar-tracking systems for a Spanish project, according to Gunther Portfolio.

But despite the slew of companies gunning to deliver concentrating solar technologies, few have been able to deliver the goods on a large scale and at an economical price.

Among the challenges concentrating solar faces are issues of durability because it has more parts than traditional solar systems. For example, Clevenger said each Stirling solar system unit is comprised of several hundred parts.

Infinia plans on contracting with manufacturers around the world to make the individual parts and assemble them in U.S.-based facilities.

But is Infinia's piston-driving approach just one more moving part to worry about? Clevenger said no. "We have developed this engine to be zero maintenance," he said explaining the encapsulating cylinder won't ever have to be opened for such things like adding more lubricant of which there is none.

Keith Johnson at the WSJ notes Venture Capital Still Likes Solar.

One of the biggest obstacles to full-scale rollout of alternative energy sources—beyond the fact that they cost more than traditional power sources—is getting the things built. Solar power’s development has been hampered in part by a lack of super-pure silicon. The wind power industry is just shaking off supply-chain bottlenecks that have crimped production.

One solar upstart hopes to sidestep production problems—before it even starts producing.

Infinia Corp., based in Kennewick, Wash., which makes a concentrated solar-power device, today landed $50 million in Series B financing that the company says will pave the way for commercial-scale production of the as-yet unproven solar thermal technology. ...

A big part of the cash will be used to help re-tool Infinia’s prospective component suppliers in the automotive parts industry, says chief executive J. D. Sitton. Infinia’s devices combine a small engine with a concentrating dish that directs sunlight onto the motor, which converts it into electricity more efficiently than regular photovoltaic solar panels. Its 250-odd components were purposely designed, Mr. Sitton says, so that auto parts manufacturers could use their space capacity to produce them. ...

Infinia hopes to start production in November this year and within a few years reach annual production of about 200 megawatts—that is, a few hundred thousand of the 3.5 kilowatt devices—with an eye to selling to utilities.

The SMH has a report on a solar thermal power project in Queensland - "Cloncurry so hot it's first on the solar block" no doubt helped along by Andrew McNamara.

IT'S HOT in Cloncurry. Bloody hot. Hot enough to power the homes for all the outback town's 4828 residents with heat from the sun. That is what the Queensland Government is hoping to do with a $7 million solar thermal power station that would make the former copper mining town the first in Australia to rely completely on solar power.

The Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh, yesterday announced the north-west Queensland town had been chosen as the site for a "groundbreaking" 10-megawatt plant that will use 8000 mirrors to reflect sunlight onto graphite blocks. Water will be pumped through the blocks to generate steam that will operate a turbine electricity generator. ...

"This is an example of the diversity of clean energy that is available in Australia because of the renewable resources at our disposal," said the energy council's chief executive, Dominique La Fontaine.

An Australian company, Lloyd Energy Storage, designed the unique graphic-block storage system. A forest of mirrors, each three metres by two metres, will reflect the sun's rays up into 50 10-tonne blocks perched atop 15-metre towers. Enough heat will be stored in the blocks to service peak daytime needs and overnight demand. Less water than falls in an average year on the power station's roof will be used in the turbine.

The project follows a decision last year by the Federal Government to give $75 million to a $420 million project to build a large-scale solar concentrator in Mildura in Victoria. That project is expected to start next year and reach full capacity by 2013. Using high-performance solar cells developed to power satellites, it could power as many as 45,000 homes.

The IHT has an update on the bioplastic industry - "Bioplastics have a small but growing market".

For Dennis McGrew, chief executive of NatureWorks, the high price of crude oil and natural gas is not unwelcome news. NatureWorks, formerly Cargill Dow, produces a plastic made from plant stalk, not fossil fuel. McGrew, a former plastics executive at Dow Chemical, says that as prices for fossil fuels soar and as the environment becomes an ever larger concern, ecofriendly plastics are becoming increasingly competitive, though they still remain a niche market.

That bioplastics are trending upward is clear. In the past month, a number of large chemical concerns have increased their commitment to market segment, including Braskem, the largest Brazilian petrochemical group, and Dow Chemical. In September, Plantic Technologies of Australia announced that DuPont would market its starch-based resins and sheet plastics in North America, a new market for a company previously limited to selling in Europe and Australi

Biopact reports that scientists have found a way to convert biodiesel byproduct glycerin into ethanol.

Recently, a way to connect the ethanol and biodiesel industries was revealed when it was determined that biodiesel could be a value-added product for ethanol plants through corn oil extraction technology (previous post). But now the link is reversed: researchers at Rice University in Houston have developed a way to convert glycerin (glycerol), a byproduct of biodiesel production, into ethanol. Both sectors are now linked and could create synergies that make both more efficient.

The glycerin-to-ethanol pathway is seen as promising, which is why the scientists behind it formed Glycos Biotechnologies to commercialise it. Once considered a valuable co-product, crude glycerol is rapidly becoming a 'waste product' with a disposal cost attributed to it - a result of the biodiesel boom. ...

The implications of this research are so promising that the process may be commercialized before cellulosic ethanol. Gonzalez partnered with Paul Campbell, who researches, develops and markets blends of microbes for industrial, agricultural and environmental markets, to form Glycos Biotechnologies Inc. The company, which was funded by Houston-based venture capital fund DFJ Mercury, expects to complete its pilot plant in early 2008.

TreeHugger has a post on "Using Sweet-Toothed Bacteria to Produce Hydrogen".

Aside from crop-based biofuels, few sectors of renewable energy have attracted as much attention as microbial fuel cells. With companies like LS9 and Amyris leading the way, the idea of engineering bacteria to produce new sources of energy has become an increasingly marketable one as gas prices continue to soar.

This high level of interest has also prompted a groundswell of new research in universities and government-funded science institutions aimed at finding ways to make these nascent technologies more practical and efficient. Scientists from Washington University and the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) recently formed a partnership to study how electrochemically active, biomass-eating bacteria could be used in microbial fuel cells.

Mike Cotta, who leads the ARS Fermentation Biotechnology Research Unit, and Lars Angenent, an assistant professor at WU, will use the Microbial Culture Collection - an ARS-funded database with accessions from about 87,000 freeze-dried bacteria from around the world - to specifically isolate anaerobic bacteria that could help produce hydrogen. Electrochemically active bacteria are able to transfer electrons from fuel cell sugars - which, after traveling through a circuit, can be combined with protons in a cathode chamber to form hydrogen. This can then be burned or converted directly into electricity.

Two taxa that are showing early promise include Bacteroides and Shewanella.

TreeHugger also has a demoralising report on the state of the oceans - "Increasingly Acidified Waters Could Prompt Mass Shellfish Dissolution".

If present acidification trends in the world's oceans continue unabated, mussels, oysters and other shellfish could become extinct as early as 2100. Carol Turley, a researcher at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, is warning that these mass casualties could have severe repercussions for humans and the health of ocean ecosystems. "A lot of shellfish are an important food source for fish as well as humans. The impacts of shellfish disappearing could be massive," she explained in a recent address.

Increasing levels of dissolved carbon dioxide hinder the ability of shellfish to build their protective shells by significantly reducing the amount of free carbonate in the water. Shellfish typically absorb calcium carbonate from their surroundings and deposit it around their bodies to make their shells; higher levels of carbon dioxide, however, limit the amount of available carbonate - which otherwise could bind to free calcium ions - by forming more bicarbonate ions.

This effect is especially pronounced in deeper waters, where extremely low levels of carbonate ions, paired with higher hydrogen ion concentrations, have caused shellfish shells to actively dissolve. Indeed, several recent studies have noted a worrying rise in the Carbonate Compensation Depth (CCD), a level below which the rate of supply of calcium carbonate equals that of dissolution.

For very much the same reason, coral reefs are also likely to be hit hard as coral polyps struggle to build the tough skeletons they need to protect themselves and provide habitats for a wide variety of organisms. Fish are also likely to not escape unscathed as acidification harms their ability to fertilize their eggs.

Links:

* Technology Review - Betting on Biocrude
* Red Herring - Wind Power Gets Gust of $16M
* The Long Now - NY Times Magazine: “The Future is Drying Up”
* UPI - Duke Energy faces water shortage
* Richard heinberg - Big melt meets big empty: Rethinking the implications of climate change and peak oil
* TreeHugger - Farewell to "Flush and Forget"
* TreeHugger - The Latest on the Disappearing Honeybee Mystery
* ABC - Press freedom declining: audit
* The Australian - Our slide into secrecy and censorship