Re:Vast solar power plant at the Moroccan desert
by ChuckMcM on Monday December 05, 2016 @05:38PM
(#13110462)
Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) is a pretty interesting, but I chuckled at this phrasing, "The hot oil is used to produce high-pressure water vapour that drives a turbine-powered generator." Seriously? Why not just call them steam turbines?
Because I was going to college in LA and my parents lived in Las Vegas, I drove that route a lot and got to watch them build Solar One[1], and toured it after it was operational.
These days with better thermoelectric generation capability[2] you can extract even more of the energy out of the heat difference than just steam turbines (which have a Carnot efficiency of about 50%) mostly because they can work down to lower differentials in heat.
Because I was going to college in LA and my parents lived in Las Vegas, I drove that route a lot and got to watch them build Solar One[1], and toured it after it was operational.
These days with better thermoelectric generation capability[2] you can extract even more of the energy out of the heat difference than just steam turbines (which have a Carnot efficiency of about 50%) mostly because they can work down to lower differentials in heat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Moja...
[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531526/an-industrial-size...