(these are solar thermic power plants, their panels are black and usually assisted by mirrors leading to a similar look)
Solar thermal concentrators, they get so hot they have to use liquid metal.
Parabolic plants also exist w/o a tower of sauron.
But half the fun is having a gleaming tower of doom!
Why would anyone want that when the alternative is a tower of sauron
All I want for Christmas is new petty gods with towers to worship.
Didn’t this exact plant go bankrupt due to solar panels being so much more efficient?
It would make sense.
Thermal concentrator cost is basically fixed: mirrors of a specific quality, tracking mounts, an eye of sauron cooling loop. That tech doesn’t change much. Same with parabolic pipe plants.
But the bulk of photovoltaic installation cost is the panels. And those get exponentially cheaper.
Actually it does change, from what I read mainly in terms of what substance is used to capture the heat of the sunlight, which in turn has other implications downstream: for example, if you melt salt and the molten salt is used to generate steam (so a generation 2 system), rather than directly heating water with sunlight to generate the steam (generation 1), not only does the efficiency go up but you can keep on generating power during the night as long as there’s enough heat left in the salt, and whilst the basic principle is the same a lot of the engineering of the system changes because you’re circulating melted salt rather than steam, you want to store some of the heated salte for the nighttime and you need to concentrate more sunlight to reach higher temperatures so the area of mirrors is larger.
Here is a paper I found about this stuff.
That’s actually very cool. There’s a lot of talk of molten salt energy storage anyway, and this just integrates it.
Maybe it could be built closer to other renewables or cities, and use a big vat to store heat from other power sources, when needed.
…Still, though.
AFAIK, the (silver?) mirrors on mounted servos that have to be kept clean are a pretty significant fixed cost.
There are hundreds of these.
No. The issue is solar panels getting much cheaper. The advantage of solar thermic plants are low cost of panels in exchange for more difficulty to maintain. This stops making sense when solar panels become dirt cheap and they cannot shift their power generation outside of peak solar(easily possible with molten salt tanks for the night, but not free)
They also function as adequate bird-zappers from what I’ve heard.
There is actually a Solar Power Generation system were a solar collector uses sunlight to melt salt which then circulates through pipes to a place were it heats up water to boiling and that steam then goes through a turbine thus generating electricity.
However to reach those temperatures a simple panel isn’t enough so what you have is a ton of mirrors over a large area all focusing the sunlight on a central tower were the salt-melting happens.
Here is an example.
By the way, this stuff actually has benefits over solar such as the ability to generate power at night (basically you don’t extract all the heat from the molten salt during the day and just keep using it to boil water to feed the steam turbine during the night), plus it’s a bit more efficient than solar panels and like solar panels it’s also improving, throught things like using different salts.
You can also choose to divert power to either new Vegas, the people, or a giant space laser which is really quite nice compared to traditional methods
It’s pretty much a required upgrade to be able to protect yourself from dropped or balistic nukes.
You activated ARCHIMEDES?! What the hell are you thinking?!
How hot does heat need to be to salt melting?
Depends on the salt used.
If you check here on table 5 you’ll see that common table salt (NaCl) melts at 801º C.
As for what’s used, in Chapter 2 of that paper they say “Molten salts consist of alkali metal or alkali metal halides and oxygen-containing salts”, so it’s not actually table salt that’s used in Generation 2 of those kind of power generators.
Thanks!
Do you know of the melting temperatures of any other substance you think I may be interested in?
Also Helios One from Fallout: New Vegas is based off of those, though I don’t think we’ve figured out how to make an Archimedes mirror out of one and a reflection satellite yet.
Solar collection like this can also explode birds if they fly through the wrong area as it’s essentially like a magnifying glass and ants.
I’m already sold, you don’t need to sweeten the deal anymore.
Where sadam Hussein
I know this is supposed to be a joke, but it’s important to understand how it really works:
- particles from the sun hit the solar panel
- the panel accelerates those particles, which creates fissile material
- the fissile material is the used in a traditional nuclear reactor
- the nuclear reaction finally heats water
It’s always a steam turbine?
🌎🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀Wait till this dude learns about mitochondria
Where is the shitpost, solar panels do work by heating up water, unlike photovoltaics.
Solar panels are good to get a baseline amount of heated water for your home.
Because I think the graphic missed the parts about the MC4 cables & the solar charge controller & the Lithium battery & the power inverter, a few little details like that.
There are literally some kinds of solar panel to generate heated water for things like home use.
They’re just boxes painted in black with a pipe with water also painted in black zigzagging inside of it, rather than being photovoltaic panels.
Were I live now - Portugal - something like that works fine even in Winter to generate hot water for things like showering.
That said even during the Summer something like that won’t generate steam (or at least, not with enough steam pressure to drive a turbine), unlike what the meme shows, though there are solar power concentrators that use sunlight to melt salt which then boils water to generate steam for a steam turbine, but those use a ton of mirrors to concentrate sunlight into a central tower were the salt is being melted. (For example).
That would be for photovoltaics not solar, no?
I’ve seen non-photovoltaic solar panels for heating pools as well which is just a coiled black hose on a black panel.
Around here a bunch of people used to have a summer shower setup, which was just a black barrel filled with water up high
If only we could figure out a way to harness the power of the Giant Fan on the other side of the sun.
Lotta loss in that system.
Should’ve put the water tank on the left to avoid loss
It seems like we could make this a lot more efficient by using pistons and having the sunlight push the pistons, turning a generator.
big solar has kept the truth about free power generation hidden for years.
If you plug a power strip into each one of those empty plugs, you could power the whole house!
In all fairness, you need to install a magnet at the far end and keep constantly pluging and unplugging it to generate power…
holyshitwhatthefuckhowisthishappening
Good idea! We’ll just need some steam turbines to help sunlight move the pistons in order to reach peak efficiency!
I think you forgot the oil powered generator under the boiling water.
It’s coal powered, so it can double as a bbq grill
Just like modded Minecraft.
Appart from using solar power to melt salt as a energy storage solution, you also have water cooled solar panels that store that heat as warm water.
What about all the gay rainbow light spectrum that powers the entire thing?
Can you connect that to ai data center that can generate an image of Trump with Clinton?
