Thermal Solar Plant To Be Erected In Australia

connect4 writes: "An article from the bulletin explaining a plan to erect a 1km high solar convection wind turbine in outback Victoria - the worlds tallest construction. Projected output per tower: 200MW. Cost to build: A$670m. Footprint of tower: 20sq km ."

Re:Good idea...

[zmooc]

It's not much more expensive than an ordinary coal-plant when you take the effects of the waste of such plants, the cost of the coals and the costs to keep such a thing running in consideration. You'd also not want to scale it up but rather build a few more... never rely on a single source of power.

More info

[Max von H.]

EnviroMission's site [enviromission.com.au] has more information regarding the technology employed, as well as some nice flash animations.

Considering Australia's size and geography, I'm surprise solar power isn't implemented on a wider scale. If only the polititians would get their heads out of their arse, they would realize solar and wind power are the only intelligent, long-term choice. They may bitch about the price, but once these things get to be built in large quantities the price will go down accordingly.

/max

Um... what about...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some questions that need to be considered:

• Maintenance costs? I mean, you don't just whack a great big building in the middle of nowhere and expect it to just work for the rest of its life, do you?
• Expected life span? If it only is good for ten years, it's a bloody expensive way to generate electricity.
• Effect on the surrounding area? A one kilometer tower is going to cast a pretty damn big shadow.
• Expected average output? 200 MW peak output is what the article says... that's not the same as 200 MW average.

Don't get me wrong -- I reckon it's a rather neat idea. But the article doesn't give the whole story by any means.

Lets put this into perspective..

[whanau]

$670 million australian isn't that much money.

Currently its $348 million US, which is about the TOC of a nuclear reactor of the same capacity
Throw in credits from carbon trading, valuable research into the technology, bragging rights and the ability
to wean australia's fossil fuel dependant economy off foreign oil (australia is the world's worst polluter per captia) this is a very very good deal. Go Aussie!

Pretty useful in near-tropical regions

[hashinclude]

This stuff could be VERY useful in near-tropical regions. like India for example, the temperature difference (in the more extreme parts ~25N) goes from 40deg C (in the daytime) to something like 10-15 at night. So this could also possibly be used to churn out far more power than the aussie counterpart, IF used correctly. This is specifically for regions that have a high temperature during day/night times, and a nice dry climate. Coastal regions wouldnt be of so much use for the simple reason that the temp. gradient obtained is not so large.

The good, the bad and the ugly

[waimate]

A few points here:

• On the plus side, a smaller version of this thing was built in spain, and worked.
• On the minus side, I don't believe it's at all clear how this thing scales.
• On the really minus side, Australia is no longer a country that has the sort of boldness it took to build the Snowy Mountain Irrigation Scheme in the 1950s, where rivers were reversed; nor the audaciousness to build the Sydney Opera House in the 1960s. It's unlikely this construction will ever happen, more's the pity.
  I think we've lost our nerve for risk, an affliction in which we are probably not alone.

Not a perfect solution

[countach]

Yep sure this is better than nukes or coal. But it will probably destroy the natural environment of whatever used to sit underneath the thing. And you need a heck of a lot of them to replace all the coal. A bit like Hydro - it's free electricity, but
you have to dam up and destroy the environment to build the thing.

Can't we just use less electricity? We really don't need anywhere near as much as we use. Street lights? A waste. Neon? Waste. Heating? Need solar passive houses. The list goes on.

It won't solve the CO2 problem

[boltar]

Why? Because all these enviromental generating schemes do is prevent the building of NEW fossil
fuel stations. What never happens is the replacement of a fossil fuel power station with
a renewable energy one. We need to reduce our overall power consumption. How many of you leave
your PC switched on for no reason other than you can't be bothered to wait 1 min for it to boot
when you want to use it again in 3 hours time?
UNtil peoples free for all attitude to energy consumption changes all we'll be doing is buying
ourselves a little bit more time but the end result of massive climate change will still occur.
Building more nuclear plants would help but the liberal right-on lobby would have a apoplectic fit
if anyone suggested that because in their not-too-bright minds they do a simplistic link between nuclear power and nuclear war so hence its verbotten.

Re:Good technical idea but..

[Hektor_Troy]

Actually it wouldn't - here's why:
1) While the towers would look quite impressive, I doubt there would be many people actually working on the site at any given moment.
2) To terrorize people, you have to give them the impression, that you can kill them at your own convinience.

Blowing up at 1 km tower and killing three people won't do that. Sending two planes into two towers where roughly 50.000 people work WILL terrorize people.

You can rebuild a 1 km. tower, but you can't rebuild the sense of security lost, when someone blows up a work place of 50.000 people and kills 4.000 people in the process.

Re:Good technical idea but.. [OT]

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia isn't exactly top of the fanatics hit list at the moment

I don't normally post OT stuff but try reading some international news [news.com.au] sometimes.

To quote from that URL:

Melbourne a target for hijack terror
By RAHUL BEDI in New Delhi, MARK DUNN and IAN McPHEDRAN
07dec01

MELBOURNE'S landmark Rialto Towers were the target of a suicide hijack plot by a terror suspect linked to the September 11 attacks.

The man, with confessed links to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network, trained as a pilot at a Moorabbin flying school in 1997 and 1998.
It has been revealed the man and associates plotted to crash hijacked jets into targets, including the 55-storey Rialto, London's Houses of Parliament and Tower Bridge, and New Delhi's parliament.

About 10,000 work in the Rialto - the tallest office building in the southern hemisphere and headquarters of some of Australia's leading financial, legal and IT companies.

Resistance from vested interests

[hwilker]

It looks like the initiators of this project already thought about vested interests. These, rather than technical issues, are most often the biggest obstacles to overcome when trying to establish a totally new technology.

The quote by an energy industry manager, "It won't work", is typical of the process:

• At first, technical issues are put forward: "It won't work. If it would work, we would have done it before."
• Then come economic issues. "It will be too expensive. Nobody will buy it."
• If that doesn't work, and the project in question looks like it might succeed, political lobby work is started. "If it goes forward, we will fire so-and-so many workers. It must be forbidden."

Usually, that is the end of things for revolutionary technologies... I hope it won't be in this case.

Re:Wonderful!

[sql*kitten]

Except, of course, for the permanent existence of a 1 km tall concrete tower occupying 20 sq km of land...

That bit of Australia is kinda flat anyway. I'm sure the top could be used for other stuff, like comms or even stellar observation, which should work really well with little ambient light pollution, and relatively clean air. It would also be a massive tourist attraction, especially if the greenhouses could be cultivated.

Plus, you'd be able to see airliners coming from a long way off. Sadly, you gotta think about that whenever you talk about tall structures these days.

Re:Um... what about...

[Dr. Spork]

You're right about the maintenance costs. This thing will have many turbines that will eventually need replacing. Probably not off-the-shelf parts, either.

In California, where we put up hundreds of wind generators, a very large fraction of them are idle because they broke and are very expensive to fix. I expect the same problem for this thing. I only wish there were a practical system for generating solar power without moving parts, something you pay for once and use forever. Sigh...

A government boondogle?

[fortinbras47]

I would be highly skeptical of a project like this. It has a huge initial price tag, even if EVERYTHING goes according to plan. What if it doesn't go according to plan? With it so high up, maintenance costs could be extraordinary if anything went wrong. This is a zero emissions plant, but it won't actually have lower emissions than a comparable fossil fuel powerplant until TWO AND A HALF YEARS later because of all the CO2 emissions created during construction?!?!? What would the lifetime of this project be?

Spending a sizable fraction of a billion dollars to reduce co2 emissions by what appears to be an inconsequential amount doesn't appear to me to be a brilliant idea. Maybe it has some value as a test example, but if so, WHY does it have to be that big and cost near half a billion dollars.

I'm not an Australian taxpayer, so I don't care if you go ahead and do it, but if I were, I would be highly skeptical...

Re:Wonderful!

[killmenow]

...and relatively clean air. It would also be a massive tourist attraction...

There goes the clean air.

why erect it?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the big objections was to the eyesore of a 1 km tower. Also it would seem a lot of expense and risk is associated with such a tall tower.

So does it have to be vertical?

Just find a nice mountain that is snow covered year round and that lives next to a desert. (Death Valley anyone?). Build an insulated chimney from the base of the mountain to the top, following the terrain. Having it lay on the ground will make it a heck of a lot cheaper, easier to maintain, it won't fall over, and it won't be an such an eyesore.

Also a 20km base is a lot of real estate. A green house is very good from a reliability and fuels stand point. But, could you use other heat sources? How about rotting compost or geothermal?
This system would do well in Iceland. Plenty of hot springs and plenty of mountains

Re:agricultural tie-in

[nels_tomlinson]

The idea behind the green house must be to produce HOT air, to be swept up the chimney. Lots of lovely green stuff under the greenhouse would tend to cool the air, and would definitely add humidity. The cooling would definitely be bad. As someone else pointed out, there will be a condensation cloud at the top of the chimney. We wouldn't want that to be any bigger than necessary, as the cloud would further cool things, so the humidity might be bad too. By the way, that's a desert. Where is the water going to come from for these hypothetical plants?

Here's another problem with the ``plant stuff in the greenhouse idea'': you use green houses for plants which can't grow in the cold outside climate. These greenhouse/tower contraptions are going to be most feasible in HOT climates, where these heat-loving plants grow naturally. Finally, the green house will be sucking in cold outside air. The plants near the outer edge might get MORE chilled at night than they would without the greenhouse (though the wind would prevent radiant cooling; this could be a big plus in high deserts).

Probably the best idea would be to pave underneath the greenhouse, and periodically repaint the pavement black.

Re:No way is this thing feasible

[WinPimp2K]

Yeah, but they were also pricing a coal fired plant at $600M, so that would cost (using your numbers) $6,850 per hour in interest costs alone (3.4 cents per kwh). So, in order for the development cost to make this unfeasable, a coal fired plant would have to generate a KWH of electricty on less than 0.4 cents worth of coal. Further, you are not factoring in any dollar value for the tradeable carbon credits a wind powered plant would produce compared to a coal fired plant.

The person quoted in the article as syaing that it wouldn't work was the guy who wanted to build lots more 1 MWH "conventional" windmills.

For those who didn't take finance, you need to calculate the "opportunity cost" of spending moneyt on a project as if you were financing it.