Solar Power

[ed browning]

The house you discuss is so expensive that it has almost no practical ideas to offer. enough said.

[Rooster]

Ed. You can contact Solartron directly at www.solartron.co.th . Or you can contact me. You can install their system on your own or use their technician if you are building the house in Thailand. They can help give you few ideas on architectural plans. The on-grid system is less expensive than off-grid system.

[ed browning]

It appears that scalable solar energy may be here already. Nanosolar in San Jose California is claiming their thinfilm printed solar sheets can be purchased ata cost of 99 cents- US per watt. If this is the case you have the beginnings of the great energy revolution. With that kind of cost it would be ideal for homeowner to power both his home and his vehicle with solar electricity. Utilities could even provide hydrogen as fuel at reasonable prices by splitting it from seawater. The US in particular is sick of dealing with OPEC. It costs us over a billion dollars a day to try to maintain the continuance of that supply and what do we get-higher and higher prices from countries that continue to oppress their own people. Yep- scalable solar is coming.

[NodBad]

100kW concentrating solar trough units (alegedly) available for purchase in Thailand.
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Just to spread a little Thai solar info...
I have dealt with a company called ECC care based in Chonburi (Environmental Competence Centre).

Their main work is purifying nasty solvents for recycling and reuse. They do an eco training day for schools or businesses which is how I came to be working with them.

BUT as well as a full-size wind turbine they have a concentrating solar facility. It has 3 or 4 parabolic troughs of about 10 x 2m. They are remarkable in that they use cheap-as-chips moulded fibre-glass units bolted together and covered with plastic mirror board and a few diagonal steady cables. These supply a mysterious engine- once I was told it was a unique invention by the companies boss and had no moving parts and hit 60% efficiency (A thermoacoustic stirling might fit that description, but 60% just about exceeds Carnot efficiency so I'm sceptical. It should require a dish to get hot enough to achieve that figure; troughs aren't hot enough). On another visit a year or two later it had become a 'steam engine'. The heat collector tubes are very small (dia. 25mm?). They claim the unit is commercially available from them if you want to buy one. From the top of my head they claimed 100kW peak output and were asking 100,000 Euros (about 4,750,556.11 THB).

But something's suspicious: Over three visits the unit has never been running and indeed was parked, mirrors down at the same angle over the course of several years between visits. I don't think it's ever used. An extreme pity as it would be the most inspirational sight for the school kids who visit. I took NASA insolation data for the site, multiplied by the collector area and allowed them an efficiency of about 30%. I then found the price paid by the Thai government for solar (8 baht per kWh).
The pay back time was in a matter of a few years. I contacted them with this info and the Thai govt. website to bring distributed power onto the grid and asked if they would like to connect and could I come and see the engine running? No reply.

(Just checked their site and seen different figures again)

If they really can knock these units out at the price and performance claimed surely with a bit of marketing every factory owner and many private individuals in the country would want one?

I have long felt that the solar solution should be to ditch NASA levels of tech and certainly to abandon Photovoltaics until the price drops by 80%. The answer is to make concentrating units (mirrors) as cheap and scruffy as is necessary to make them economical. I've built accurate parabolic troughs with school kids. A sheet of bendy mirror board, some scrap timber a tape measure and a pocket calculator hits the spot. Phillips made portable stirling engine generators in the 50s at affordable prices. They need have little more technology or cost than a lawnmower engine.
ECC seemed to be approaching the ideal I'd dreamed of but are sat on their knowledge.
Go on; someone rowst 'em up and buy one and publicise it. I dare ya!

links:
http://www.netmeter.org

[apee705]

In present world the alternative ways are going to be explored due to the world energy crisis & solar energy is one of them. It will not only fulfill our ever increasing energy demand but also it can be truly called "environment friendly" energy source. We should join hand with concerning authorities to make such project materialize in true spirit...

[drake]

Renewables are so overrated.
If you paid attention to what went in to the process of manufacturing for all the components, be it photo-voltaic or wind or hydro, you wouldn't call it environmentally friendly
Metals - strip mining.
Plastics - oil.
Solar Cells and other electronic components - toxic chemical process.
Fiberglass and epoxies are technically toxic.
And none of that is really renewable, is it ?

But I digressed.

Except for passive solar (building) designs and hot water heating,
solar takes up too much money and space for what part time power it provides.
The mirrors or panels must be constantly cleaned or the efficiency degrades.
Doesn't work when it's cloudy, doesn't work when it rains or snow, or blowing sand/dust.
It's expensive to start up and ROI takes 20 years or more, often times never.
Great for places with a lot of unusable space and not much cloud, rain, or sand/dust storm.

Not that I don't like the technology or anything.
I'm just saying that solar has inherent issues that may never be resolved no matter how much tax money is thrown at it.

One spring weekend 2 years ago I went to Doi Chieng Dao.
A beautiful place with the view of an entire valley below, trees a blooming, flowers everywhere.

There was a small solar array feeding a battery bank and inverter to power the park facility at the top.

At this elevation, the fog often envelopes everything until noon.

We pitched our tents and, after dinner, all of us were having a rather pleasant evening snoring away until....
at Zero effing dark hundred, in the dead silence of the effing night, the god effing loud enough to wake the effing dead 'battery bank voltage is low' alarm went off and stayed on until someone shut it off around 8 AM.
Good thing I took my iPod along.
Nobody else got any sleep however.

[bangbang]

From what I know, the reason people are not utilizing solar energy is because installation cost is way more expensive compared to what people conventionally use. If it were cheaper, everyone would use solar energy by now.

[hawaiiman]

People are so strange! they like to use power all odd hours of day or night. They want their beer cold whether the sun is out or not, if ManU is on at 1:00 am, they want to watch it, etc They talk about being eco friendly, and then put in a system that requires lead acid battery back-up. Sorry, I know most of these points have been covered. My point? Uhhh.....wait...Oh Yeah! LFTR technology! It was developed at Oak Ridge in USA in the late 50's and a working plant was in operation for 10 years. This technology is so safe and stable, they could just turn the thing off Friday evening and switch it back on Monday morning. It uses low pressure fuel, so no hydrogen or steam explosion like in Japan and no chance of meltdown like Chernobyl. It recycles it's own fuel, so instead of 5-7% utilization like current plants, it uses above 99%, so no long term waste. Fuel is Thoreum which is common in the earths crust, and doesn't require the whole centrifuge complication to purify it (chemical rather than isatopic purification). So why didn't we go with it? The powers at the time were into making nuclear bombs and it is no good for that, unlike the systems we see today. Why don't we change now? GE and other heavy hitters make a good chunk of change selling nuclear fuel. Who is smart enough to do it?
Chine (yup) sent a team to Oak Ridge and copied the existing files from the previous reactor and research. They will have first plants online in less than 5 years.
With wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, you have to put the plant where the source is, then power lines to where the users are. Line loss 10%. LFTR can be small plants near the users.' Nuff said

[hawaiiman]

Sorry--it's China..not Chine.
The plant will produce a small amount of radioactive plant components over the long term, but still light years ahead of current tech.