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Comments: 139 +- Technology: Google Getting Into the Solar Mirror Business on Saturday September 12, @10:17AM
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adeelarshad82 writes with this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"Google 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 [25%] or more. 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. ... Google hopes to have a viable technology to show internally in a couple of months, Bill Weihl said. It will need to do accelerated testing to show the impact of decades of wear on the new mirrors in desert conditions."
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Solar Beards (Score:3, Interesting)
Beards at Google and this article [slashdot.org] a coincidence? I think not.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
This [youtube.com] is waaay better.
Power? (Score:3, Funny)
I guess they figured out thier electric bills were too high.
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Re:Power? (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess they figured out thier electric bills were too high.
Is it just me that's annoyed that in most power plants we actually still use glorified steam engines ?
I know that it's the best way we currently have to convert heat (which is the only type of energy we manage to recover) into electricity, but it still feels kludgy. I hope we'll figure out something else eventually.
Parent
Re:Power? (Score:5, Informative)
Glorified ? How about "highly sophisticated" ? Even a nuclear submarine is powered by a "glorified steam engine".
Parent
Re:Power? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see the big "kludge", myself. Is it the part where you hook it up to a bundle of wire and spin it around in a magnetic field to make electricity? I think that's pretty awesome too; you can move a whooole lot of electrons that way.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. It's good, proven technology. It is simple, with just a few moving parts that all move continuously in the same direction. It scales up very well: you get one big expensive steam turbine and you can point a boatload of cheap mirrors (/heat sources) at it. It takes advantage of some of the exotic properties of one of the most fascinating chemicals out there: Water. It produces no toxic waste to dispose of (not from the steam-engine part, at least... maybe a few lubricants you'll need to recycle, but that's pretty trivial).
Another fascinating chemical that's commonly used is sodium (since there are typically two circuits) which is commonly used in the secondary circuit when the heat source is radioactive.
Still,
nuclear (indirect if it's solar) -> heat -> motion -> electricity
doesn't trike me as being an elegant solution even though I'll agree that it's convenient.
Re: (Score:2)
Does anyone do sodium in anything other than Fast Breeders anymore?
My exposure to actual practice is about 30 years out of date, but I don't think much has changed.
Liquid metals like sodium are used on Fast Breeders largely due to the moderation effect which water in the primary loop would cause.
They do have their own issues.
They are more expensive to build and operate because the primary loop is highly radioactive.
Also corrosive.
A primary/secondary leak becomes both more likely, and much more dangerous.
For
Re:Power? (Score:4, Interesting)
The kludgy bit is that you go from heat->motion->electricity, with losses at each step. Maybe that's just good reuse, having already debugged both steps pretty thoroughly.
But after a century or so of power plants, it's starting to feel like optimization is no longer premature. The power plant is the very center of a tight loop, and worth optimizing.
Unfortunately, any time you replace a well-understood legacy system with a new one you get bugs, and the whole heat->electricity thing isn't yet anywhere near well library-quality code. It actually turns out to be less efficient, not more. But as a programmer you look at the inefficiencies and figure there's got to be a better way.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We need someone to open-source a design of one of these setups so we can build these ourselves and power our own homes with our wasted front yard space ---- the trophy yard is dying with the baby boomers.
Or we could grow fruits/veggies in our yards and cut back on the 400 gallons of fuel/person used each year to bring us our groceries.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And this being bad exactly how?
I mean a 300*300 km area of that tech suffices for all of humanity’s needs right now. With no rare materials, complex error-prone technology, or high costs.
I call that a pretty sweet deal.
Of course we will optimize it by the use of the right collector/core (imagine placing something else in the middle, like a special material or solar cell). But hey, until then, we’re very good with what we got. And the price... oh the price... Energy for next to nothing!
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Not all power plants use steam. Some use liquid metal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_metal_cooled_reactor [wikipedia.org]
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If I'm not mistaken, the liquid metal is just the first step - it takes the heat from the reactor away from the core into a transfer tank that super-heats water to produce steam that drives the stator that creates the electricity. :: rotary motion of wires + magnets = electricity.
Ultimately the reactors all seem to work on the principle of ${heat source} + water = steam to drive a turbine
In theory a propulsion engine (boats, subs) could go directly from the steam driven shaft to a propeller, but I don't thi
Re:Power? (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't it extremely dangerous? It could escape the power plant by pretending to be a cop and then go on a killing rampage.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We might still be using steam, but glorification technology has advanced tremendously since the nineteenth century.
Modern glory engines generally achieve virtue ratings in the giga-archangel range on the Baden-Powell scale. The biggest problem is containment of the antikarma halo from contaminating the surrounding noosphere and uplifting our whole cultural discourse; in the worst case, this could create a self-perpetuating virtuous cycle, the so-called Shambala Syndrome. In some cases residents within fifty
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I actually remember seeing test setups of this tech 18 years ago, not a new technology, but still very cool.
Try 18 hundred years... While stories of Archimedes' Mirror [wikipedia.org] may have been greatly exaggerated (Mythbusters and a couple of independent projects have recreated the effect but with an infeasible time-frame for warfare), the concept and 'technology' of parabolic mirrors or arrays to concentrate solar heat are pretty ancient. Also, Death Ray FTW. :D
An interim solution (Score:5, Funny)
Solar panels don't have to last too long when fusion is only thirty years away, am i rite?
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If Google would run candidates.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, corporatism. Putting for profit businesses in charge NEVER leads to trouble.
Testing? (Score:3, Interesting)
The article (and others I've googled) says nothing abut what the technology will be. I wonder if it would be like the ESA improvements for the satellites - http://www.rssd.esa.int/SA/PLANCK/include/payl/node5.html
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know why they'd need to do conditions-testing; look at the auto glass in the same neighbourhood, and figure that at a couple hundred feet off the ground you get maybe 10% as much wear and tear (most of the harsh blowing sand is at ground level).
There's a new solar-mirror setup just north of Lancaster CA. It's some sort of test prototype, I don't recall the details. The way the mirror array is situated here, the collector is visible from the ground as you go by on the highway, and the reflection is b
meanwhile.... (Score:4, Interesting)
photovoltaic still has subsides, but no more for solar-thermal.
and we were the 3rd country with most solar thermal in europe untill now.
Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Did they drop support because they couldn't get it to work well, or is it working well enough that no subsidies are needed anymore? Or is Italy just broke and dropping a lot of governmental spending in general?
Google and Govt talk: (Score:5, Funny)
Weihl said Google had not intended to invest much more in early years, but that there was little to buy. "I would say it's reasonable to be a little bit discouraged there and from my point of view, it's not right to be seriously discouraged," he said. "There isn't enough investment going into the early stages of investment pipeline before the venture funds come into the play." The U.S. government needs to provide more funds to develop ideas at the laboratory stage, he said. "I'd like to see $20 billion or $30 billion for 10 yrs (for the sector)," Weihl said. "That would be fabulous. It's pretty clear what we have seen isn't enough."
Google: "Government, please throw in some 20 or 30 billion dollars to into solar energy research"
Govt: Nah, deficits are high. We dont have money. It should be done by the private sector. 20 or 30 billion dollars is too much way too much we cant afford it It is not a trivial sum like 780 billion dollars to clean up after wall street greedy moneybags. Tell you what? Grow too big to fail. Then come back asking for a couple of trillion dollars. Then we will be able to do it. OK?
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Is there an "Ignorant cliche, -1"? No...oh well.
And the summary forgot: externalizing to govt. (Score:2)
Google is the new Shinra (Score:2)
That was a joke. Sort of.
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"Do no Evil" (Score:2, Funny)
So first we had "Do no Evil" and now they're working to blind us all so we can "See No Evil" too. What next, voice recognition -- "Hear No Evil" ?
Where did they get the people? (Score:3, Interesting)
This makes we wonder, where did Google get people who know how do develop mirrors? Did they buy a smaller solar power company, hire a bunch of people, or reassign some computer engineers?
Re:Where did they get the people? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Cool; Now enhance coal plants (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Would that count as "enhancing Coal and Gas plants"?
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I think that's a good idea, but I don't think it's the first step.
My idea of the first step is that Google builds a few pilot plants that power various Google centers during the day time. Work out the bugs on a small scale. And then license the technology to somebody else...who can use it to beef up old plants and build new ones.
Talked to a friend at Google about this (Score:5, Interesting)
A friend of mine who worked at Google at the time had clearly been involved in this project (although he didn't tell me...exactly) We were discussing alternative, sustainable power, and I've always been a fan of solar thermal -- he described in way more detail and depth than I thought possible the resource limits we'd run into if we tried to power America by solar thermal -- in particular the current mirrors in the prototype plants use a huge amount of aluminum, and scaling those plants up to make more than a rounding-error of our energy needs would take way more aluminum than we could forsee having. Plus, of course, it takes a ridiculous amount of electricity to refine the aluminum in the first place.
I was rather surprised, and checked his math...which was pretty accurate. I do think that other alternatives to aluminum are practical, and Google's going there.
Thad
Re: (Score:2)
NYC they are all recycled. I see a lot of old 60 year old or so Chinese people taking them out of the trash and hauling them for the $.05 each recycling money back. they are always hauling hundreds of cans at a time. Since they live with kids or inlaws it's a nice source of tax free cash for them
Re:Refining Aluminum? (Score:5, Informative)
Aluminum is refined from bauxite and takes a huge amount of energy to produce initially.
It is extremely rare to find it in free form.
Parent
Use More (Score:4, Interesting)
Since I'm fond of flights of fancy...
Beam splitter, Fresnel lens, simple prisms, whatever works to separate different parts of the spectrum. Thermal energy going to thermal power generation, the rest going to solar cells that efficiently utilized that particular part of the spectrum.
The rest of course is the engineering.
this is google... (Score:2)
I would bet that the tech they are developing is the software/hardware required to aim the mirrors at the focal point. If that gets standardized and mass produced, I could see dramatically scaling up solar thermal power cheaply.
Its something I have thought about for years, but never had the capital or free time to invest in seriously.
Did Google misinterpret (Score:5, Funny)
Did Google misinterpret the reason that Oracle bought Sun?
"substance that produces steam" (Score:3, Funny)
in which the sun's energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam
What is this mythically substance that produces steam when heated up?
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Re: (Score:2)
In the Obama administration? Fat chance. They'd be more likely to throw a parade. (And you just need to look at a DC opinion poll or two to see how much the civil servants love Obama).
since you put it that way... (Score:2)
Perhaps we should take action to ensure that the regional players are able to advance their wmd programs at a pace outstripping their ability to use them effectively.
Producing a warhead is a relatively trivial matter whose only barriers are raw material and refining limitations.
If refined weapons grade fissile materials are able to flow more freely throughout the region, the barrier to producing warheads drops to the point that any good machine shop could build a warhead.
The beauty is that ability to put th
Re: (Score:2)
Dear Anonymous Coward,
we at Google hear your plea about world over-population. This is why we are proud today to tell you about our upcoming product. It will not only help control the world's population but will also push the need for large-scale construction projects.
Coming Soon from Google: Goozilla!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's to be expected. Consider a conversation between a cigar-chomping flint-hearted power company executive and his favorite toady:
E: Smothers! What's the hold-up with the new coal plant?
S: Well sir, some environmentalists say coal smoke causes acid rain and carbon dioxide ruins the climate
E: P