Solar power holds the promise of clean, limitless energy, but it currently suffers from high costs and an inherent disadvantage of not working when the sun isn't shining. The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is taking a best-of-both-worlds approach by developing a hybrid solar/gas system that increases the efficiency and reduces the carbon footprint of natural gas power plants.
The PNNL system uses a parabolic mirror to focus sunlight on a four by two-foot (1.2 x 0.6-m) chemical reactor lined with narrow channels 8.1 mm (0.318 in) wide. The sunlight heats natural gas in the channels next to a catalyst that breaks down the gas molecules into a mixture of hydrogen and carbon dioxide called synthesis gas or syngas. Connected to the reactor is a heat exchanger that collects waste heat from the reaction and recycles it back to the reactor to boost the process until 60 percent of the sunlight is converted to chemical energy. Tests indicate that the system allows a natural gas plant to operate at about 20 percent greater efficiency.
"Our system will enable power plants to use less natural gas to produce the same amount of electricity they already make," says PNNL engineer Bob Wegeng, who is leading the project. "At the same time, the system lowers a power plant's greenhouse gas emissions at a cost that's competitive with traditional fossil fuel power."
It's no surprise that the system works best in areas with lots of sunshine and according to PNNL, it's adaptable to different sizes of natural gas power plant sizes with a 500 MW plant needing about 3,000 solar dishes. In addition, the syngas can also be used to produce synthetic fuels for vehicles.
PNNL plans to test the system at its campus in Richland, Washington as part of a program to increase the system’s efficiency and bring down the cost to a projected six US cents per kilowatt-hour by 2020 to make it competitive with conventional fossil-fuel plants. Also, methods aimed at mass producing the system will be developed at the Microproducts Breakthrough Institute, a research and development facility in Corvallis, Oregon, while industrial partner SolarThermoChemical LLC plans to manufacture and sell the system after development.
Source: PNNL
And while you are "real" at it, go and check the Department of Homeland Security's pile of white papers on unintended uses of nuclear fuel cycle byproducts by people with bad intentions. You probably don't wanna hear it.
More ethanol? You never heard of any problems in the global food supply caused by us burning what could be food in our over-sized fatcars? I guess not.
The unpleasant truth about energy is that if we want to use lots, we should at least have the decency to come up with a real smart way of supplying ourselves with that energy, without doing it at someone elses expense.
There are ways. There's plenty of energy, everywhere. We just have to figure out how to use it. Stop being so pathetically scared, please. Parroting what you are told on Fox News ain't gonna help.
Also France imported German solar generated energy last year during periods when the temperature got really cold which affected the water supplies to the nuclear power plants in France!
Geez. What century are you living in? Some old ethnic joke?
Free yourself from your planetary-centric world-view!
The Sun ALWAYS shines!!
If you leave the planetary surface, you can collect solar power 100% of the time, and with much better efficiency.
We've known how to do this, how to transmit it to the surface of the Earth, and how to do it economically for over 35 years!
Have you looked at the cost of putting stuff into orbit? $1000 per pound is a bargain.