renewable

Solar Power with Salt

- Adam Clare

Thermal solar power plants uses energy from the sun to heat up water and then run the resulting steam to power turbines. Simple enough, but now Siemens is looking to make that whole process more efficient by using salt.

Solar thermal power plants that produce hotter steam can capture more solar energy. That’s why Siemens is exploring an upgrade for solar thermal technology to push its temperature limit 160 °C higher than current designs. The idea is to expand the use of molten salts, which many plants already use to store extra heat. If the idea proves viable, it will boost the plants’ steam temperature up to 540 °C—the maximum temperature that steam turbines can take.

Siemens’s new solar thermal plant design, like all large solar thermal power plants now operating, captures solar heat via trough-shaped rows of parabolic mirrors that focus sunlight on steel collector tubes. The design’s Achilles’ heel is the synthetic oil that flows through the tubes and conveys captured heat to the plants’ centralized generators: the synthetic oil breaks down above 390 °C, capping the plants’ design temperature.

Startups such as BrightSource, eSolar, and SolarReserve propose to evade synthetic oil’s temperature cap by building so-called power tower plants, which use fields of mirrors to focus sunlight on a central tower. But Siemens hopes to upgrade the trough design, swapping in heat-stable molten salt to collect heat from the troughs. The resulting design should not only be more efficient than today’s existing trough-based plants, but also cheaper to build. “A logical next step is to just replace the oil with salt,” says Peter Mürau, Siemens’s molten salt technology program manager.

Read the rest of the article.

Brewery is Also a Power Plant

- Adam Clare

Here at Things Are Good we tend to like beer and we’re always happy to see the brewing process become more environmentally friendly. A smart inventor in the USA has found a way to convert a naturally occurring element of the brewing process and converts it into natural gas!

The brewery is Magic Hat and their motto is “Saving the earth, one beer at a time” – I can’t wait to try their beer.

The MIT-trained mechanical engineer has invented a patented device that turns brewery waste into natural gas that’s used to fuel the brewing process.

The anaerobic methane digester, installed last year at Magic Hat Brewing Co. in Vermont, extracts energy from the spent hops, barley and yeast left over from the brewing process — and it processes the plant’s wastewater. That saves the brewer on waste disposal and natural gas purchasing
The 42-foot tall structure, which cost about $4 million to build, sits in the back parking lot of Magic Hat’s brewery, where it came online last summer.

Fitch, 37, is CEO of PurposeEnergy, Inc., of Waltham, Mass., a renewable energy startup company whose lone product is the biphase orbicular bioreactor, which is 50 feet in diameter, holds 490,000 gallons of slurry and produces 200 cubic feet of biogas per minute.

Brewers big and small have wrestled with waste issues since the dawn of beer-making. In recent years, they’ve turned to recycling — both as a cost-saver and for environmental reasons.

Read the rest of the article.

Thanks Greg!

World’s Largest Wind Farm Starts Sprouting

- Adam Clare

Britain has started construction on the world’s largest wind power generating installation. This will be a massive increase in renewable energy hitting the power grid in the UK – and a benefit for all thanks to less pollution.

Check out the video on the project:

The 100 turbines, each measuring more than 300ft, will power more than 200,000 homes. It will increase the amount of energy generated from offshore wind in the UK by a third to 1,314MW, compared to 1,100MW in the whole of the rest of the world.

Mr Huhne said the UK is leading the world in an exciting new technology that will cut carbon emissions and boost green jobs.

Read more at The Telegraph

Green Jobs in Spain Reversed Economic Downturn

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

The Republican party in the USA has been trying to defend the drilling of oil despite an ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, nothing new there. They have also been arguing against progressive economic reforms to make the American economy more efficient and powered by renewable sources.

Thanks to the Republican incompetence I have stumbled across good news from Spain. They tried citing a report that they thought was against green reforms, turns out those reforms have turned a region of Spain from a place of economic misery to a haven of productivity.

Sixty-five percent of the electricity used in Navarra comes from renewable sources — primarily wind — built over the last twenty years. Over those years, the region went from having the highest unemployment rate in Spain to having the lowest rate, today.

“Under President Obama’s leadership,” the report concludes, “the United States’ decisive support of renewable energies…will aid in rapidly overcoming the current economic crisis…”

Read more about Spain’s success

These Batteries Rock

- Adam Clare

Wind and solar energy generation is criticized for not being always-on, so people have been looking to batteries to steady the flow of energy. Over at Cambridge, there are some people who think that a new type of battery made out of gravel could help with the full adoption of sustainable energy.

Isentopic claims its gravel-based battery would be able to store equivalent amounts of energy but use less space and be cheaper to set up. Its system consists of two silos filled with a pulverised rock such as gravel. Electricity would be used to heat and pressurise argon gas that is then fed into one of the silos. By the time the gas leaves the chamber, it has cooled to ambient temperature but the gravel itself is heated to 500C.

After leaving the silo, the argon is then fed into the second silo, where it expands back to normal atmospheric pressure. This process acts like a giant refrigerator, causing the gas (and rock) temperature inside the second chamber to drop to -160C. The electrical energy generated originally by the wind turbines originally is stored as a temperature difference between the two rock-filled silos. To release the energy, the cycle is reversed, and as the energy passes from cold to hot it powers a generator that makes electricity.

Isentropic claims a round-trip energy efficiency of up to 80% and, because gravel is cheap, the cost of a system per kilowatt-hour of storage would be between $10 and $55.

Keep reading at The Guardian.

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