The "Solar Power Tower" will be the worlds biggest solar power plant and one of the tallest structures ever built by man. Standing a kilometer high and with a base six times the size of New York's Central Park the tower is based on a well known principle. Hot air rises.
The base of the tower is an enormous greenhouse known as the expansive collector zone. As the Sun's rays beat down on the greenhouse the air inside becomes heated. With nowhere else to go the hot air rushes towards the tower and as it does it drives 32 x 6.25MW pressure staged turbines located at it's base.
The 200 Mega Watt tower will produce enough energy to power 200,000 homes without any harmful greenhouse gas emissions. That's the equivalent of taking 90,000 cars off the road.
Unlike a number of projects that have popped up over the last few years this technology is tried and tested. The prototype for the tower operated for seven years in Manzanares Spain and consistently generated 50kW output of green energy.
As well as being clean green and the way of the future it's set to join Ayres Rock and The Great Barrier Reef as one of the worlds most popular tourist attractions.
4 comments:
With an energy source as abundant as the sun this is the right way forward. Clean, reliable and renewable energy is exactly what the planet needs.
This is a great idea all right. But you gotta convince someone to pay for it. With vested interests (e.g. oil companies) so entangled with our financial institutions it's gonna be really difficult to finance something of this magnitude.
That’s a fair point, but with sites like this one people will become aware of alternatives that are better. Nobody believed me when I told them about the water powered car. Exposure is what these technologies need. If everyone knows about these technologies and are aware of the benefits, then it’s harder to pass them of as fiction rather than reality. Spread the word.
The only problem I see that really needs to be overcome for this to really be viable is the foot print. Example, it would take almost ten of these to produce the same amount of power as the generating plant in Colorado Springs at about 15 times the acreage. I don't think we, world wide, can afford to use that much land for this purpose.
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