Chile's Atacama Desert is as eerily beautiful as it is
barren, hot, and dry. Yet this seemingly inhospitable patch of Earth
might be the perfect host for a different kind of solar energy, one that
has nothing to do with photovoltaic panels.
Solar
updraft technology is attracting interest in desert regions worldwide
in Chile, the Southwest United States, Australia, China, and the Middle
East. Fueled by hot air, rather than direct sunlight, solar chimneys
present a compelling prospect for producing clean, renewable energy.
They also offer significant advantages over conventional photovoltaic
(PV) panels—but at the moment, they face even more significant financing
hurdles. (Take the related quiz: "What You Don't Know About Solar Power.")
Here's
how they work: A massively large, transparent canopy, or collector, is
suspended 2 to 20 meters (6 to 65 feet) off the ground, and the air
beneath it, warmed by the sun, becomes hotter than the air outside. In
the middle of the collector is a tall, slender tower. As the buoyant,
warm air is drawn up through the tower, it passes through turbines
attached to the tower's base that feed off the rising air's kinetic
energy, powering a generator.
Not Just Hot Air
Solar
updraft technology might sound like a futuristic power source, but the
concept was first suggested 101 years ago by Isidoro Cabanyes, a Spanish
army colonel.
"It's perfect for where you have lots of sun and lots of cheap, flat land," said Patrick Cottam,
a doctoral engineering student at University College London's Center
for Urban Sustainability and Resilience, who has become an expert on the
technology for his thesis. (See related story: "As Solar Power Grows, Dispute Flares Over U.S. Utility Bills.")
The
main advantage of solar updraft over PV panels, Cottam said, is "it
overcomes the intermittency of solar power." It doesn't need sunlight to
operate, just warm air, so it continues to churn out power after
sundown. That's because the energy that's absorbed by the land when the
sun is shining keeps the air in the collector warm enough at night to
keep the turbines spinning.
That effect can be easily
and cheaply enhanced by covering the ground with gravel or bitumen, or
burying sealed bags of water just below the surface. PV solar plants
cannot provide power at night unless they're equipped with expensive,
complicated storage solutions that can handle very high temperatures.
Moreover,
PV cells can lose much of their efficiency if they're covered by even a
thin layer of dust. That's a problem in desert areas, which are not
only dusty, but also very short of the water needed to keep solar panels
clean. Solar towers need no water, and their canopies, which are less
affected by grit, can be dusted clean without water.
So
why aren't the world's deserts dotted with many hundreds of solar
towers? "The capital costs are very high," said Rudolf Bergermann,
co-founder of Schlaich Bergermann and Partner
(SBP), a German engineering firm. He should know. SBP is currently
working with another Australian company, Hyperion Energy, to built a
200-megawatt plant in western Australia that would provide electricity
to tin-mining operations there. It would have a 1-kilometer (.62-mile)
tall chimney made from cement and steel, and a collector 10 kilometers
(6.2 miles) in diameter. And it would cost $1.67 billion to build.
That
price tag is enough, Bergermann admitted, to put off potential
investors for an industrial-size plant based on a technology that has
not been tested widely. SBP and Hyperion are hoping for government
funding, but Bergermann said he's not optimistic that public money will
be forthcoming.
There is no point in building a smaller
facility, according to Bergermann. A solar updraft plant "only makes
sense on a large scale," Bergermann said, because the up-front costs are
so high. Solar updraft is much less efficient than PV—only 1 to 2
percent of the energy that goes in to the tower gets converted into
usable power, compared to PV's efficiency rate of 8 to 15 percent—but
that doesn't matter.
If it is built big enough, a solar
updraft plant could produce electricity at a cost per kilowatt-hour that
is competitive with conventional solar power, Bergermann said,
depending on the plant's financing. And because the only moving parts of
a solar updraft plant are the turbines and generator, the overall cost
of running and maintaining it is very low. (See also "Mojave Mirrors: World's Largest Solar Energy Ready to Shine.")
A Toppled Test in Spain
So
far, there has been only one long-term test of the technology. Back in
1982, with German government funding, SBP built and ran a small,
experimental 50-kilowatt solar updraft plant in the south of Spain. It
consisted of a 195-meter (640-foot) tower, fashioned from corrugated
steel, and a canopy 244 meters (800 feet) in diameter.
And
it worked like a charm. The pilot plant was designed as a temporary
structure that would last just three years, but it kept running until
1989. By then, however, its steel guy cables had rusted, and it finally
toppled in a strong windstorm. "But it gave us a great understanding of
the thermodynamics that we could extrapolate for use on a larger plant,"
Bergermann said.
SBP continued to do in-house research
on solar updraft technology during the 1990s. In 2000, it partnered with
Australia's EnviroMission to build a large solar updraft plant in
western Australia. But the project was predicated on expected government
funding that never materialized, and the partnership ended in 2004.
There
is a privately owned experimental 200-kilowatt station operating in
Jinshawan, China, but Bergermann said the Chinese plant's tower is too
short and its collector too small to work properly. Cottam, who has
visited the station, says its designer made the mistake of using glass
in metal frames for the collector, and many of them cracked and
shattered in the heat. "It's a nightmare," Bergermann said dismissively.
Funding
woes continue to bedevil other solar updraft tower efforts. SBP's
former partner in Australia, EnviroMission, is in the process of
licensing its technology to a Texas company, Apollo Development. Apollo
spokesman Domenic Carlucci said that, at a minimum, the company hopes to
build at least three 200-megawatt plants in West Texas, each featuring a
2,400-foot (732-meter) tower, and each costing between $700 million to
$800 million. Apollo is still in the process of raising funds to obtain
the license and is conducting site studies, Carlucci said. (See related
story: "Desert Storm: Battle Brews Over Obama Renewable Energy Plan.")
EnviroMission
also hopes to build a plant in Arizona similar in size to those planned
in Texas, saying it is conducting engineering feasibility studies in
Arizona and is awaiting land-use permits for the plant. But a story in The Arizona Republic
last June said EnviroMission was having trouble raising cash (a
reported $750 million) from investors because it didn't have contract to
sell the electricity to a utility. An earlier purchasing agreement with
a California utility fell through because of EnviroMission's lack of
certainty on financing, according to the article.
Meanwhile, EnviroMission announced in
December it had signed a memorandum of understanding to partner with an
unnamed "Middle East base development entity" to build "multiple" solar
towers in the region. The timeline for all of these projects remains
unclear, given the funding challenges.
The Balloonist and the Observatory
Now
a new and decidedly unexpected player has entered the field, saying he
thinks he can dramatically reduce the cost of building a solar chimney.
Using fabric.
Per Lindstrand, a Swedish aeronautical
engineer and record-holding balloonist, thinks his British company,
Lindstrand Technologies, can erect a kilometer-tall, inflatable tower
that would cost just $20 million to build. Of course, the cost of the
tower typically represents only a quarter of the total cost of a solar
updraft facility, according to Bergermann. So, in the case of an entire
plant that costs $800 million to build, $200 million of that figure
would go toward erecting the tower. Knocking that amount down by $180
million would indeed amount to pretty decent savings.
Lindstrand's
interest in building a solar chimney goes back a couple of years, when
he was approached by a man in Chile's Atacama Desert with a particular
power problem to solve. David Rabanus, instrument group manager at the
ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array) Observatory, helps
manage a cutting-edge radio telescope project that runs on fossil fuel.
The
$1.3 billion observatory, an array of 66 highly precise antennas
designed to peer back billions of years to when the first stars and
galaxies were formed, sits 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) above sea level in
the Atacama. Its off-grid desert location requires the observatory to
truck in diesel and natural gas for generators that provide the power
required to shoot radio signals deep into space. (See more about ALMA: "Cosmic Dawn.")
Trucked-in
fossil fuel is neither a cheap nor a clean solution, a problem not lost
on ALMA's Rabanus. A couple of years ago, he stumbled across an article
about SBP's Spanish project. The fact that a solar updraft plant could
run 24/7 without water was, to him, a big selling point, because there's
precious little water in Atacama. (See related story: "Solar Micro-Grid Aims to Boost Food and Power in Haiti.")
The
region is also earthquake-prone, which is why the observatory also
needs a power plant that's more robust than solar panels. But Rabanus
also recognized that erecting a 1,000-meter (3,280-foot)
cement-and-steel tower in a seismic zone wasn't a great idea, either.
That's when he got to thinking about an inflatable tower, one that could
easily withstand nearly any size temblor. That idea led him to
Lindstrand. "I reached out to Per because he's a problem-solver and
because of his experience in building aerostats," Rabanus said.
Lindstrand
quickly warmed to the notion. He liked the challenge of "taking on
mission impossible in fabric engineering." Cottam, who had recently
gotten his master's in engineering from Warwick University, was at the
time working part-time at Lindstrand Technologies. When Lindstrand asked
him if he wanted to undertake a feasibility study for an inflatable
solar chimney, he readily agreed.
A Fabric Tower: Written in the Stars?
Initially,
Cottam got funding from both Lindstrand and University College London.
He also won a coveted industrial fellowship grant from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.
This gave Cottam a total of £65,000 ($107,900), enough funding to spend
four years researching how best to build an inflatable solar chimney.
He expects to finish the research next year.
No one else
is working on a fabric tower, Cottam said, but there is a small amount
of academic research into solar updraft technology taking place at a few
universities around the world. Cottam, meanwhile, is currently
conducting tests on a 3.5-meter (11.5-foot) prototype to help him design
a tower that can defend against wind loading. Next, he plans to build
and conduct tests on a second, larger prototype that's between 10 and 20
meters (33 and 65 feet) tall.
Cottam's working concept
is a modular design. His tower, steadied by guy wires, would consist of
panels of fabric separated by helium-filled, doughnut-like rings. If the
winds around it get too strong, the tower could be temporarily
deflated. If a panel sustained a leak, it could be lowered to ground
level for repairs. Cottam's current prototype is made from octax, a
material not dissimilar to that of a potato chip packet. He's not yet
sure what material would be used for the final tower, though he knows it
would have to endure eight to 20 years in a tough environment,
weathering both sand abrasion and harsh UV light.
If all
goes to plan, Lindstrand hopes to build a 180-megawatt plant at ALMA
that would feature the kilometer-tall chimney, and a collector 7
kilometers (4 miles) in diameter fashioned from some sort of polymer
film. Rabanus says the observatory needs only a 3-megawatt plant, but
the additional power could easily be sold to nearby mining operations.
Bergermann,
however, is skeptical that Lindstrand can do it. "[Lindstrand's] cost
estimates are way too low. An inflatable membrane tower can be done, but
economically, it's not feasible," he said, mainly because it would
probably require developing a new type of material that would likely be
very expensive.
Lindstrand remains undaunted. "I can't
think of anything cheaper to build. There is nothing expensive in
building it, no unique components." He stresses, though, that he won't
formally approach the European Southern Observatory, the 16-nation
coalition that is ALMA's main operator, until he feels he has a design
for an industrial plant that's commercially viable.
But
Lindstrand believes that moment could arrive relatively soon: He is,
after all, a veteran balloonist who knows how to take advantage of
prevailing winds."There is good reason to believe it will happen,
because we have momentum now," he said.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/04/140416-solar-updraft-towers-convert-hot-air-to-energy/
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