It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Solar Tower Buronga. (Discuss) - This article is about a particular design of solar chimney. For the astronomical instrument and other uses of the term, see solar tower.
The Solar Tower is a type of renewable-energy power plant based on the solar chimney concept. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ...
The Solar Tower Buronga will be part of the first solar thermal power station and if built it will get the tallest construction ever built on earth. ...
A solar chimney is an apparatus for harnessing solar energy by convection of heated air. ...
The Solar Tower is a type of renewable-energy power plant based on the solar chimney concept. ...
Renewable energy (sources) or RES capture their energy from existing flows of energy, from on-going natural processes, such as sunshine, wind, flowing water, biological processes, and geothermal heat flows. ...
A power station (also power plant) is a facility for the generation of electric power. ...
A solar chimney is an apparatus for harnessing solar energy by convection of heated air. ...
Air, passing under a very large agricultural glass house (between 2 and 36 kilometres in diameter), is heated by the sun and travels upwards towards a convection tower where it rises naturally, thereby driving wind turbines, which generate electricity. The Solar Tower could be built almost entirely from recycled materials. A kilometre (American spelling: kilometer), symbol: km is a unit of length in the metric system equal to 1000 metres (from the Greek words χίλια (khilia) = thousand and μÎÏ„Ïο (metro) = count/measure). ...
Wind turbines A wind turbine is a machine for converting the kinetic energy in wind into mechanical energy. ...
Electricity Electricity is a property of matter that results from the presence of electric charge. ...
Intellectual property concerns
EnviroMission Ltd Australia owns the exclusive license to German designed solar power technology in Australia.
H. Alfred Goolsbee owns the Japanese trademark and service mark "Solar Tower" and retains certain rights to the use of the words "Solar Tower" in the United States as well. A trademark (Commonwealth English: trade mark) is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. ...
A trademark used to identify a service rather than a product is called a service mark (SM). ...
Development EnviroMission is planning to build a solar tower, the Solar Tower Buronga, in Wentworth Shire, New South Wales, Australia. The originally-announced design called for a 200MWatt tower at a height of 1km and costing around AU$900 million. If built, it would have become the tallest structure in the world by a significant margin, and the announcement attracted significant world attention to the Solar Tower concept. The Solar Tower Buronga will be part of the first solar thermal power station and if built it will get the tallest construction ever built on earth. ...
Motto: Orta Recens Quam Pura Nites (Newly Risen, How Brightly You Shine) Nickname: First State, Premier State Other Australian states and territories Capital Sydney Government Governor Premier Const. ...
During the final design stages, new heat absorption and storage technology was acquired which reduced the height to around 650 metres while generating the same level of power.
Shortly after taking on the services of Australia's largest investment bank Macquarie Bank (at the time famous for their infrastructure investments and risk-management) the scale was reduced again to only a 50MWatt tower. This would be the minimum size and the most risk-averse option in what the company announced as a "flexibly scalable" 50-200MWatt range that can be scaled to local and nearby demand. Macquarie Bank Limited is an Australian merchant bank and financial services group, providing a broad range of services to business. ...
No information has been released on the final size, but applying the square-cube law suggests an estimate of 450 metres or less.
Enviromission is also working with Sunshine Energy (Aust.) Pty Ltd. who have made an initial USD$8,000,000 investment to enable development of this technology in China, and a third Solar Tower is reputedly to be built in Texas although few details are available. Official language(s) None. ...
Competition Several other techonologies exist that can convert solar energy into electrical energy. Solar power describes a number of methods of harnessing energy from the light of the sun. ...
Electrical energy or electromagnetic energy is a form of energy present in any electric field or magnetic field, or in any volume containing electromagnetic radiation. ...
The solar chimney is part of the solar thermal group of solar conversion technologies. There are two other designs that work in the same way. The first is the solar trough design and the other is the solar dish/Stirling design. Of these technologies the solar dish/Stirling has the highest energy efficiency (the current record is a conversion efficiency of 30% of solar energy). Solar trough plants have been built with efficiencies of about 20%. The solar chimney has an efficiency of less than 2%. However, due to its greater scale and simplicity, the solar chimney may have an economic efficiency approaching or exceeding that of the other methods. A parabolic trough is a type of solar thermal collector. ...
A Stirling engine and generator set with 55 kW electrical output, for combined heat and power applications. ...
In physics and engineering, including mechanical and electrical engineering, energy efficiency is a dimensionless number, with a value between 0 and 1. ...
There are several measures of economic efficiency: Pareto efficiency Kaldor-Hicks efficiency X-efficiency Allocative efficiency For applications of these principles see: Efficient market hypothesis Welfare economics Production theory basics See also Business efficiency Inefficiency ...
Given that a solar chimney is "mostly concrete with a few moving parts" and does not have a lot of mechanical complexity, it is also considered to be economically attractive. Once it has been commercially proven (as opposed to technically proven) it should fit into the existing investment asset classes and risk models as conventional power stations and other heavy infrastructure that investment banks and institutional fund managers are familiar with.
An alternative of the solar chimney are the Energy towers proposed by Dan Zaslavsky. The "Energy Tower" is driven by spraying water at the top of the tower; evaporation of water causes a downdraft by cooling the air thereby increasing its density, driving windturbines at the bottom of the tower. The "Energy Tower" requires a hot arid climate, and large quantities of water. Saline seawater may be used for this purpose, since fresh water is a scarce commodity in arid areas. Though significant amount of energy (about 40-50% of the windturbine generated output) is consumed by pumping the liquid water to the top, the major advantage of this downdraft scheme is that it avoids large area solar collectors needed to drive an updraft tower. Dry air is continuously sucked into the tower at the top, without need for a large area collectors. An Energy tower is a new concept for producing electrical power for consumer consumption, the brainchild Professor of Dan Zaslavsky. ...
Australia's only existing solar power station, White Cliffs Solar Power Station, was originally built using solar dish/steam turbine technology, but has now been upgraded to photovoltaic to obtain almost twice the electric output from the same dishes. White Cliffs Solar Power Station is Australias first solar power station. ...
The Vortex engine, proposed by Louis Michaud, is an idea very similar to the solar chimney but replacing the physical chimney by a vortex of twisting air. However it is not absolutely clear that this could be made workable (for instance, wind might disrupt the vortex). The concept of a Vortex Engine, proposed by Louis Michaud, aims to replace the physical chimney in the Solar chimney with a vortex of air. ...
External links - EnviroMission Int'l EarthNews Online.
- Solar Chimney.
- EnviroMission Ltd. of Australia.
- SolarMission Technologies, Inc..
- Wentworth Shire, NSW - Proposed Site.
- The Solar Chimney : Electricity from the Sun (Paperback Book) by Jorg Schlaich
- "Solar Energy Without a Collector", Dan Zaslavsky
- Energy Towers: Pros and Cons of the Arubot Sharav Alternative Energy Proposal
News Articles about the company - 5 December 2005 - SMH - Enviromission Seeks a Handout
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