EEVblog 1553 - World's First Commercial Solar Power Station
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- Опубліковано 30 вер 2024
- Dave visits the world's first commercial solar power station in White Cliffs, a small opal mining town in outback Australia.
Built in 1981 and using 14 heliostatic tracking 5m diameter dishes, this concentrated thermal solar plant produced 25kW of power using a steam generator.
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#ElectronicsCreators #Solar #Tour
Yes do more. Solar thermal is great for things that need heat, like sintering metal or doing smelting of ore, where you have lots of sunlight, but are far from ant fossil fuels to do it otherwise. So you can use that sort of large central tower to take the red ground, almost all of it being iron oxide from the greatest biological event in the history of the planet, the first oxygen releasing blue green algae evolving. Then turn it into ceramic blocks for building. But solar panels, lower temperature and easier to handle, also got better, leaving this as a relic, though the high temperature research did help in making the consumer panels better, as they also run hot, though with more sunlight into them you do get much better conversion efficiency.
Also cheaper and don't degrate under the sun since now the heat and UVs are not your enemy
We can also store heat fairly easily and have been converting heat into electricity for a while now
In Finland they made storing high heat (like +400 C or so, easy to google it) in the siloses filled with sand. Super cheap and efficient. Then the heat was taken back from those "heat banks".
@@mehow357 Yes, a way to store "low grade" heat, and then later on use it for things like heating a house, as otherwise it is too expensive to extract energy out of what is likely to be a low temperature differential.
@@SeanBZA I don't remember how do they extract the heat back, but most probably you're right that they extract the heat to heat up homes. BUUUT, few years ago i was reading about the place where they heat up metal alloy that emits (in low Temps, definitely way below 1000C) some spectrum of light and optimized solar panels for those wavelengths. The efficiency of this system was enormously high as those panels were optimized, plus it was not in open space, but in special building where "lost" or bounced photons were "bounced back" again into panels. That was extremely interesting article.
Interestingly, the modern Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants have one huge advantage. They don't heat the water directly. Instead they heat molten salt, which adds as a heat battery and allow the plant to continue producing power well after sunset.
Well, everything have a flip side, the back side of salt storage is that you lose heat gradient and there for efficency.
Although they can release the stored thermal energy after sunset, does this not create a lag at sunrise? The salt needs to get back up to temperature in the morning to reach efficient levels again. There's no free lunch.
@@OliverHamilton that’s a good question. I don’t know how much heat is retained through the night. But then, CSP today is not an alternative to PV. It’s complementary.
@@kjlovescoffee yeah it can help smooth out the output, being less variable to clouds etc. I think it can almost be thought of as analogous to the inertia of rotating mass in other power generation systems, a kind of thermal inertia.
@@kjlovescoffee is a CSP more economical?
I wish you could of spoken with some town officials and orginze a tour of the insides along with some of the people who managed the facility still alive today. That would of made this video +5000% more amazing.
He's not Tom Scott.
One quick thing: those things feeding into the fat arrow on the loss diagram are actually *gains* rather than losses, they are counting 7kW of free enthalpy from the feed water in the energy going to the Engine Room.
Amazing to see this again. I went to White Cliffs as a kid on a family holiday back when this was operational. I have a photo somewhere of the white-hot glowing coiled steam pipes. Yep, we were the sort of family that went to see an array of parabolic solar collectors when we were on holiday.
I love that I knew about this, because in school I was given an assignment to see if solar was viable anywhere in the world, and I used that town/installation as a source/example in my report! Glad to see the town is still using solar in some form all these years later.
That was a instresting look at early Australia solar. More episodes like that please.
This was very interesting. I hope to see more real world examples of power distribution systems, and stuff talking about civil infrastructure. Your commentary was great.
I love the look of original configuration. Real sci-fi vibes.
That was much Betterer than what I expected! Nice job!
Also let him know, I subscribed from my work PC so he made me double a sub!
I worked on a project for some Sterling Solar dish project. They were Hydrogen Turbines. The project got scrapped cause the test plots they were running were under performing. It was a super cool concept. I would love to have seen the project come full circle.
I always fond sterling engines fascinating.
@@tripplefives1402 Stirling engine thermal dishes don't have piping, the whole engine is packaged into the dish head unit, right in the focal point. It's a membrane linear motor with a linear generator, basically a giant speaker with a few extras. One moving part only.
But like you said PV won due to its simplicity and therefore (still) plummeting cost. Stirling engines are after all engines with lots of machining steps, the costs involved have a floor that we hit decades ago. Semiconductors are still finding that cost floor.
@@iaadsi Nah, if you need to power your whole home solar panels cost orders of magnitude more than solar heat. A big solar evacuated tube costs 50 dollars for example.
@@vitordelima were talking about electricity, not heat. The stirling engine plant makes electricity same as the OP video.
@@iaadsi You understood what I meant.
One of these would make a nice domestic hot water generator.
I would have thought a modern solar panel running a modern heat pump electric hot water heater would be more efficient and you can use the grid when needed.
Yeah it would be nice except solar PV is still better. I have a 4kw PV array that is directly connected to an ordinary electric 250L hot water tank. And it produces 90C hot water all year round. I originally had a evacuated tube solar hot water and it didn't perform well in winter at all. That's because concentrated solar or evacuated tubes require direct sun light where as PV can work well enough to produce boiling water even in diffuse light. My PV based hot water is the best thing I ever built. Its almost as if I have nuclear power providing my hot water lol.
@@teagueman100 sounds like a good system. It's good idea to eliminate converting DC current to sine wave if not needed.
Not really - having to track the sun for the parabolic mirror to work is a nightmare. If all you're doing is heating water, just flow water through channels on a flat collector of equivalent area - in fact it could be used to cool a PV layer ON TOP to provide flat panels that both generate electricity AND use the waste heat to heat water.
@@tiitsaul9036 DC is only good for short runs as the voltage is typically low and line losses are high. AC can be efficiently transformed to very high voltages which greatly reduce transmission line losses then transformed back to low usable voltages at the destination. The other advantage is the high voltage wires can be smaller diameter which reduces cost and weight.
That's really cool, always been intrigued at the idea of thermal solar as in a way it's simpler, ex: you could build this in a post apocalyptic setting with scrap stuff. PV cells, not so much. But never realized the efficiency was so low. I guess something like this would be better for actual heat but even then PV might still be better and also have less moving parts. No pumps etc.
Molten Salt solar is actually a really good overnight solution as apposed to batteries.
The efficiencies every time I've looked have been really bad. You'll end up with all the losses of this one here and more. Batteries and solar normally ends up being 2-4 times more efficient. There are a few things that might make them viable but it doesn't look like the pros are outweighing the cons for grid storage except in maybe a few niche cases like heating in places with already setup waste heat piping for city heating. Even then it might be a hard sell to not have everything switched over to electric instead.
No it isn't. Round trip efficiency of real world molten salt energy storage is 70%, li-ion batteries are 90%+
The only benefit is the low cost.
@@Muonium1 Thats an overly optimistic round trip efficiency too. If you hit 60% you're already pretty high for a molten salt battery. You'll often see marketing for these molten salt companies claiming 90-99% efficiency while failing to disclose thats thermal storage efficiency or rather how much of the heat is lost while its stored. Efficiency ratings for heating, pumping, storing, and converting back to electricity are much worse.
Wait. Why aren't these on the road surfaces? Fake!!!!
Learning curves can take a long time. At least it was tried and things were learned.
and it actually worked!
@@xiaoka And it got constantly improved but the energy lobby didn't like it. SolarPACES is a web site with some examples of how far the technology went.
What an interesting system, thanks for sharing. Didn't realize a dish so small could create superheated steam!
Flow rate is your friend, keep it low enough and you can superheat steam to 500C easily, and then keep it dry for a good length in well insulated pipes.
I went by a solar installation is in the US near the CA/NV border. They had mirrors reflecting light up to a central tower. I swear, you drop a chicken in that concentrated light, it'll be cooked before it hits the ground.
Inside will be raw, though much of the outside will be burnt off. 1000C jet exhaust does the same, though you also tend to find the things that get into it vanish fast, and the walls it impinged on took hours to cool down again. The birds that flew into it got plucked,before they got ripped to pieces impacting the ground, or made flat against a wall.
thats crazy they went with piston engines instead of a turbine.
I think many country could benefit from a small scale (1 to 1.5 m diameter) parabolic mirrors at home. People are deforesting and burning gas all day hiding themselves from the sun while cooking. It would be nice to have an inflatable DIY parabolic mirror with a small weight and size when empty. This way, you could carry the mirror in a backpack and inflate it when required in minutes. Still, a motorized version that follows the sun is better for a static installation as you don't need to adjust it every 5-10 minutes. Sergiy Yurko proposes many DIY concepts such as the inflatable one. www.youtube.com/@sergiyyurko8668
Fraud!! Scam!! And you Dave should know out everyone better!!!
Drive further to Adelaide and I'll show a bio active wavelength photothearpy unit based on the physics of Chinese acupuncture and Einstein's photoelectric effect.
Acupuncture is placebo bullshit.
Was this first though? In 1981 the Solar One thermal demonstrator plant in the Mojave Desert in California was providing 10,000W into the Southern California Edison grid to power the little town of Daggett, California and they ran power generation 24 hours a day using heat stored in a giant tank of granite boulders in an oil bath. That plant was the prototype for the central tower type solar thermal plants used today. I got an inside tour of the plant in 1981 with an employee and I recall pictures of the building of White Cliffs at the time.
No idea, but that's the claim.
Got a link for that mate? Wiki says different.
@@Lazy_Tim I stood next to the generator, at the time. It was a General Electric and was GE locomotive blue. My father was friends with the site manager for Sandia National Labs. There was also another solar thermal plant next door to the East which was already operating and was based on horizontally oriented cylindrical reflectors at ground level which didn't need any active tracking of the sun, but it was as efficient and suffered from wind blown desert dust on the reflectors. I don't know if that other demonstrator was connected to the grid, but I knew the guy who flipped the switch to connect Solar One.
@@Peter_S_ My research says this one was "arguably the first commercial solar plant" as it had legit paying customers in the town for the energy produced from it. If another system was grid connnected, maybe it wasn't done so with an actual customer contract?
Wikipedia for Solar One says "Solar One was completed in 1981 and was operational from 1982 to 1986"
I wonder if this technology could work better for desalinization or pump water than other methods
"All the dishes are now stowed in a position away from any sun."
- Mainly just worried about the big one that's real close to us.
🤗 Love the travel episodes.
As inefficient as it is, the embedded carbon, construction and maintenance costs must surely be lower than a solar panel that barely lasts 10 years?
If you set up some funky lights and rotate the dishes they could act like disco balls and you could have a party
You are going to have to contact the university and see if they’ll send you a concentrated solar cell module to tear down …..
Yeah try solar panels in that thick cloudy weather you got there and see the efficiency of 0.01%. CSP is the next generation of photovoltaics.
Power tower is a competing technology, not a dish solar replacement. Dish solar is still around and efficiency is up to about 35%. Also have to remember that a dish have almost twice the interception rate as a Flatt panel solar. So area for area they produce almost 4 times as much energy, and over a wider span of the day.
Its really grid subsides that make PV profitable today, not low price or efficiency.
One have to consider the cost of storage. A flat panel solararray produce a peak during mid day. A parabol mirror produce about the same energy from the very morning to the very evening. This partly produce much more power per installed MW, but it also lower the usage of batteries considerably
Ive never seen it, but spoke to Professor Kaneff at the Perth Solar Energy Congress in mid 1983. He was there talking to visitors about the technical details of the instsllation. I thought it was brilliant at the time, and wanted to make a small scale copy. They used high transmission glass for the cut mirrors, and i recall he mentioned a certsin Dow Corning silicon (which didn't hurt the backing) to glue the 4 corners of each mirror where they touched the curved fibreglass surface. He said they first made a smaller section of a parabolic sector on the mould, then attached mirrors, and tested it in full moonlight rather than the Sun for testing functionality. The mirrors were approx 100 mm each side, and the reflected light could focus on a spot not much bigger than that from memory. He had lots if photos of the construction steps. It was brilliant. From memory, the pistons in the converted motor, lifted the steam inlet valves off their seat at TDC, and there was a clever overflow method to remove lubricating oil from the surface of the condensed steam, which was recycled. I must go and see it one day if still there.
Great video, thanks.
amazing, thank you for sharing!!
Love these side videos, wouldn't even mind less technical stuff if you happen to be going past any "deep history" you run across.
All those heavyduty electronically controlled az/el mounts. 🤤I hope they don't let them fall into complete disrepair.
I'm only five minutes in but wonder if they really were using a steam turbine. You keep saying so but the pictures in the video shows a three cylinder steam engine built on a two stroke diesel block (Lister HR 3 Diesel Crankcase with shaft, connection rods and lubrication system) fitted with sleeves and pistons more suitable for steam and a valve set with lifters integrated into the top of the pistons. If that's what was used then it was a pretty inefficient engine. A double or triple expansion engine would have had a bit better efficiency. Not that it would make all that much difference with all the rest of the posses in the system such as the long tubing and all the supporting tech. As I write this I hear you talk about the losses from piping the superheated steam from the collectors furthest away to the generator room.
A sterling engine might have been more efficient yet but it would have been more dependent on proper cooling.
But as a tech test site it was a nice setup. The big idea was obviously not to make the most efficient solar power installation possible, but to test tech and see how viable different parts of it was. And the money was probably primarily spent on those reflectors and the control systems that tracked the sun. These are large expensive parts that has to do their job, and they have to prove reliable and robust. Also they have to stand up to storms and the occasional rain without the mechanisms failing, the mirrors falling off or getting dirty.
No it's not a turbine, I had no idea what I was talking about. That's what happens when you don't have a script and just stumble across this place and shoot an impromptu video.
Awsome video Dave really cool thanks mate, nice to see not so little Sagan out with his Daddy too, ❤ I dont think the losses really matter so much when you have a huge piece of land and a small town in the outback especially if energy source is free, its more running and maintenance costs vrs the alternative ie diesel generators or connecting upto the grid etc in my opinion at least..
Steve Arcs
That was Huxley at the end of the video. Sagan is now bigger than Mrs EEVblog.
@@EEVblog 😮 wow, I guess I've been watching your channel a while 😅... ❤👍...
Hope your all well mate
Steve
Yeah, that's the problem with all the "Free energy schemes": They're SO EXPENSIVE! 😂
I don't like CSP but I am seeing a lot of places where it has been improved over the years. I want to see if some press can stamp these curves out of a single sheet of stainless steel.
Could probably do a lot to cut the costs, and the shapes will be less expensive to get just right now, so interesting to see what we could do without Russian and Chinese quartz. These things do seem like they can outlast the photovoltaics, but the real question is total life cycle emissions per kWh and m2.
I wonder why solar thermal isn't more popular as a technology (especially the sort that can hold the heat in a thermal mass of some kind and generate power with it at times when the sun isn't shining and avoid the need for any kind of batteries).
seems too large compared to PV. It needs turbine or engines running off that hot liquids to create electricity. Like sort of steampunk-ish tech.
Solar powered tourist generator, that's unique.
0:41 ... Wasnt that car in Mad Max... ;p
I've always thought solar thermal has more legs on it for large scale commercial solar energy, in countries with the sunlight to drive it. Photoelectric panels are great for smaller installations on roofs end such, but for a large scale installation they are somewhat fragile, whereas a mirror is basically indestructible if cleaned regularly and carefully. I am sure the lessons learned from White Cliffs have been fed into subsequent projects, so even though it is no longer complete or operating, it has earned its heritage status. It looks like there's quite a lively community at White Cliffs too!
It's a very small community. Dirt roads, one pub, one corner store, and a huge lot of people live in underground dugouts. We stayed two nights in an underground hotel, and went opal mining with the Young Guns youtube channel. Very cool place if you ever get the chance.
You got to start somewhere
Solar panels are not really fragile.
And not more fragile than these mirrors.
The greatest danger to medium sized solar fields is that criminals steal them.
now thats a bobby dazzler!
Solar thermal roadways!
Looks like the day you visited it was cloudy, not a peek power day. Good to see some history.
Yeah, they had a rare spate of terrible weather.
They had one of these at the back of ANU on the lake in Canberra (can see it from the foot path), not sure if it is still there.
Yes, they had a much bigger reseach dish.
Yes please do more tours of interesting power facilities around the world. Will give you a reason to travel. Do a nuclear facility, hydro facility, and geothermal facility. Just a recommendation.
I doubt a nuclear facility will let me film inside. I've done a Syncrotron video.
@@EEVblog You can try Olympic Dam mine, which probably will be amenable to offering a tour, as it seems amenable to public outreach. You just have to fly to Adelaide first, to catch the daily flight there.
Otherwise there is only one nuclear isotope producer in Australia, right by you in Sydney, and any others you would need to endure at least 14 hours on Quantas first.
Most nuclear plants are visitor friendly, at least to those who they see as either unbiased or proponents, though the one I did some training at was not so amenable, as it officially did not exist. Something about the number 6, and the South Atlantic, with a malfunctioning Vela satellite, I think. It definitely does not exist now, just some very clean ground.
Thanks a lot! I really appreciate the milestones of engineering. Even if we can do it better nowadays. But this is the fate of engineering: Today leading edge, tomorrow common stuff and afterwards just obsolete old scrap.
More solar power research from Australia (courtesy of the Curiosity Show): ua-cam.com/video/9TxLPnMX5gY/v-deo.html
Isn't 1000 watts inclusive of diffused global irradiation? So the direct radiation must be less right?
Also interesting is a solar furnace that was built in the south of France in the sixties. It is used for material research etc, not power production.
(although there has been a powerplant near that site as well, but it was operating from 1983 so indeed later than what you visited here)
2:55 .......not only contained the superheated steam TURBINE generator but batteries as well !
while showing us a drawing of a steam piston engine block LOL
25kw?? 🤣 that's cute ... I somehow imagine a ozzy-steam-punk age with gas powered washing machines and steam powered blenders ...
It's great to see the old tech! If you can do more of these types of videos please do! 👍
Very interesting. Do more solar history.
"Hi, I'm about eleven hours from Sydney..."
Wel, I'm about 8 hours from Sydney so you must be really far off!
Greetings from The Netherlands. ;-)
there being a spinning turbine is actually a smoothing capacitor, buffering kinetic energy. And the heat is buffering thermal energy.
Which means it's much less sensitive to a single cloud.
The turbines in coal power plants are massive flywheels too. They can spin for days.... So blocking the coal delivery railtracks isn't any effective form of protest.
There is some larger thermal solar generator plants around the world. One of them is curiously in Germany, near a research center.
It could also be repurposed as a radio telescope at night. If the tracking is any good. But you usuallx used s cryocooled NLA. And these might not be best located directly next to the hottest spot.
1981? 25 KW peak? 1,000°C? Disused? How about 1969, 1MW, 3,500°C, still in commission. Odeillo solar furnace, Font-Romeu, France. It followed the earlier research Mont-Louis Solar Furnace built in 1949 and provides 50KW. The nearby Themis solar plant opened 2 years later than White Cliffs, has output of 2MW and is still operating. Sadly the "pioneering research" done at the White Cliffs station amounted to "how can we exploit this without paying the French any royalties." And that's what was at the root of all the inefficiencies you list.
Huh!!!!😮
You talked about turbines but show a piston engine generator in pictures!!
Very cool...I enjoyed it and would like more. Thanks!
Turbine? The diagram looked like a reciprocating assembly driving the shaft.
You misinterpreted a part of the efficiency graph, enthalpy and pumping power ADDED to the efficiency. Being that a larger enthalpy and pumping power meant more power conversion.
Wouldn't the distinction of the first solar power station belong to Frank Shuman in 1913 in Maadi, Egypt? Pumped lots of water out of the Nile for irrigation.
Now I wonder if they took this power station's idea and upscaled the mirror dish in Fallout New Vegas' HELIOS One.
... And they absolutely did from other modern solar installations.
Bohh driving 11hr 42 minutes and only getting 1038 km? Thats only 85kmph average or something, wow, I thought you would have higher speed limits in a country so large.
Bohh driving 11hr 42 minutes and only getting 1038 km? Thats only 85kmph average or something, wow, I thought you would have higher speed limits in a country so large.
I worked on the bigger brother of the White Cliffs Solar converted system. The bigger brother was a 100 square meter dish focusing into about a 350mm X 350mm water cooled high efficiency solar cell colleting head.
There was only one built in Forster near Bendigo Australia,.
I don't care about solar power station. NO.
Each building should be covered in solar harvesting pieces and elements, so that each building generates energy for itself and around it.
We need to promote decentralization, no?! We don't like communism right?! A centralized system?! We like independence for each region and thinking for itself.
So is with energy. We don't need giant global corporations to offer energy and manipulate pricing when we could have partial/total independence.
This is the best advantage, because it also eliminates infrastructure and maintenance costs. If you use equipment for 100MW of power transmitted it will cause a certain wear in the equipment. If you only transmit 1MW, the infrastructure will be subjected to less effort and require less maintenance, thus being good for the electrical companies too.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_furnace_of_Uzbekistan
Feel better now Dav, poo pooing world first Australian tech.
Pull ya head in..?
Hey mate, first in Australia maybe. 1913 88kw plant in Cairo.
"In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most.
Time taken in stocking energy to build an energy system, adding to it the time taken in building the system will always be longer than the entire useful lifetime of the system.
No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores.
No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it.
This universal truth applies to all systems.
Energy, like time, flows from past to future"(2017).
Beauty Dave! I saw your old photo and realised I had visited White Cliffs in 2001 when it was still operational with PV collectors. You could walk around the dishes and be immersed in the amazing saturated blues. The dishes brought the blue sky closer to the red dirt and it all looked so intense and futuristic. Also it made a slight hissing noise...would that have been the water cooling?
In Spain they did several of these with a HUGE Molten salt Tower in the Middle of Massive fields with 100s of panels, to Horrible cost cause it Raised Electricty costs massively cause now the building of them has to be Payed off. Atleast the Smaller ones on top of Hotels do the business of heating up Thousands of liter of water.
Efficency isn't the best measure when excess area is available. At the time I believe the installed cost vs power output was beating solar cells rather easily. However, small solar panels are being installed at a cost that would only buy a few square inches of cells back in the 70's. Now panels can provide power at less than the maintenance cost of a solar thermal/steam system. The production process of making solar cells got that much more efficient.
There were a number of solar projects that predicted the cost of the refined silicon continuing to rise, not be cut in half and then cut in half again. Yield and production rates of scale slashed the attached labor costs of silicon cells and most all the less efficent but cheaper (at the time) solar programs are all but gone.
Power storage is now the thing. Could see Edison Cells make a comeback for a time. Inexpensive and abundant materiels and size/weight efficency isn't a factor if bolted to the ground, it's the very long life and low maintenece requirement that make them attractive. A home install that can go over 50 years with little upkeep and not catching fire is a thing. Twice the weight and footprint much less so. Just don't bet everything on it since something will change the playing field.
Pridicting futures is tough. Supercomputers never did get to cover a full kilometer square.... ah well. Did get the Trek-like comunicators with the flip phone. Never did make the noise when opened so.... Rockets do land on their tail, just rather miss the large deco fins... 🙂
Dave driving for 11 hours to a location which is clouded. In Aussie-land. Now *thats* something you dont see each day ...
thjat doesnt look like a steam turbine... cylinders? pistons? and for 25kw, a turbine isnt a good choice. they chew a lot of steam, and small size is real inefficient. leakages goes out the roof.
makes you wonder how hard it is to retro fit existing steam turbines...
yknow, the ones in the coal fired stations currently being decommissioned and scrapped?
yeah... megawatts. that takes a bit of mirror.
i was playing around with fresnel type arrays, just use offcuts of mirror from the glaziers, long strips in a flat box with a few angled battens inside, wack a sheet of glass over the top... easy to clean, and the heat being in a long strip isnt so intense. nice length of 40mmcopper pipe, coil of 1/4 through the inside, pack the space with pool salt. and yeah... as long as it comes out at 80C, its fine for the hot water system...
cheaper than evacuated tubes?
If you add up all of the solar energy collected by 14 * 5 meter dia. dishes and divide that into 25kw production that gives about 9 % efficiency. So the second phase of the project should have been a study to get the efficiency up. At about 2:55 to 3:00 min into the video, you mention a turbine while your diagram shows a piston engine. Why wasn't this turned over to a university for engineering research ? This would be a good way to invest in education instead of moth balling an expensive facility.
I simply like to be Nosey & check out peoples lives👌 & the outdoors..... with a little bit of Electronics now n again😳😉
10:25 @davejones your boys are growing up fast! Nice family pic at the end. We are planning on a trip to Sydney and I think we’ll make a stop by White Cliffs to check that out since my boy wants to see the outback. Now I have an actual place to take him rather than roaming around out there! Thanks for the vid!
Noice! Didn't see any signs like they would have here in the USA: "Your Tax Dollars at Work"
The best effeciency you will see out of a photovolteic cell (comercially available for the home) is between 20% to 23%. Of course these don't last long and they only produce peak effeciency under ideal conditions a maximum of 4 hours a day for less than half the year. You are better off with geothermal.
They could have saved all that money and effort by doing a teensy bit of math. 25 kilowatts is about $1 an hour wholesale of electricity. If they have 4000 hours a year of sunlight, they are making about $4000 a year. That won’t even pay for a tenth of the labor and maintenance costs, much less make any dent in the initial investment. Interesting to see but let’s not get anybody’s hopes up that this is our solar future. A similar solar collector in Nevada was abandoned a little while ago. Same dreadful economics.
I think this was a very thorough experiment in thermal electric power generation. It also was very clever in avoiding unknown risk such as thermal towers have with long open air stretches of concentrated solar energy that in the US southwest turned out to ignite birds flying though it on fire! With all that effort and very good implementation over all those reflective parabolic thermal dishes, the housing, steam driven generators and battery electric storage it only originally generated 25 KW. A high end bus conversion RV can have 20 KW generator housed in half a storage bin. That doesn't include Diesel storage.
It wasn't covered in the video, but how many days can it provide power when there is little sun? In California a Tesla solar roof and power wall home owner was equipped to run 4 days without sun before having to use grid power. During the California wild fires his home lost grid power due to the forest fire risk or maybe the forest fires themselves and the wild fire smoke was so thick the solar cells didn't make much electricity for two weeks until the smoke thinned out. He struggled through having to go with little AC during times they really needed it to clean the smoky air. With some regret in his voice his opinion was he should have a backup generator.
this is hardly the first! The Spanish company Abengoa installed a solar power station using molten salt 10 years ago in California and Arizona! It may be the first in Australia, but not in the world.
random content idea, what about finding a young-in who have a project just out of their grasp, anything from the most basic powering a LED to an intermediate project that can be knocked out in an hour, and tutoring them through it, that way you're finding unique ways to communicate the fundamentals for specific applications, brings in new people by covering random topics, and refreshes the old hats on the basics.. just a random thought
I guess they had to find a use for all those little mirrors once the demand for disco balls dried up.
At least this kind of equipement make sense ! Photovoltaic can be such massive waste of energy (especially when they are made using coal as energy source for there manufacturing)
I guess the engineers that did the Nevada solar plant that has a few hundred of these mirrors pointing all the heat towards the center tower never bother studying this FAIL!! Lol😂😂😂😂
😂 had u jumped that fence and got chased by security you'd have way more views by now.
😂
A great sight for thermocouple thermoelectric generator and upgrade the mirrors. Just need new can-do people on an old project. 😎 Great info, thanks.
If that's what was done, forty years ago, imagin what could be done now, with a fraction of the fast emptiness of Oz'! Terra watts!
“The ducks guts” amazing idiom there… just when I thought I’d heard them all…
interesting they just leaving it to ruins.. (like most big aussie projects..even if its heritage listed).. it could be retrofitted for radio astronomy quite easily...
How good would a peltier/tec solar concentrator work?, maintenance, lifespan, power
02:55 Talks steam turbine, shows 3 cylinder Diesel 😂
I got a tour of a very similar installation at Lajamanu in the Northern Territory about a decade ago. It was cool, but it was generating naff all power. I gather they probably rolled it out into the communities after the trial at White Cliffs.
Another electrical go act about Australia. They made the first electric cook stoves.
What a shame not allowed in and have a look around from an engineering perspective. That would be something to see. To see a plant that can adjust to a wide variety of power inputs.
That said, there is a reason why exothermic based power plants are used as base loads (whether coal, gas, geo thermic or nuclear) is because the efficiency drops when the boiler pressure gets lower.
Getting the balance right takes time cause of getting the amount of steam being produced to adjusting the turbines for the amount of steam to the load on the turbines to the condensers efficiency for the heat coming in by adjusting the cooling water depending of the temp of the cooling water etc etc etc. Not like just turning on more water at a hydro plant.
I remember seeing on a pbs show called 3-2-1 contact, a similar vintage solar power station that used flat mirrors that would track to focus the sun on the top of a tower that would then boil water and run a turbine. Was pretty advanced back then. ua-cam.com/video/gK6NnqGmb1o/v-deo.html
There is one thing that speaks for this, you can theoretically build such a solar collector in you own shed. I would heat a wind tunnel with it tough, abusing that warm air wants to go up, no need to handle steam. On the other hand, here in Germany it would make more sense building a small vertical wind turbine, a scrapyard version could be made from an old drum and a generator out of an old car.
Solar thermal from what I understand can also just sort of operate without needing to have massive replacements like photovoltaic panels do which have their own battery lives where they just stop working and need to be disposed of.
Ultimately it turns out we got it right the first time by using heat energy as that remains the most viable and long lasting method of electricity generation.