Magnifying The Sun's Power

Today, some brilliant scientists are doing the same thing to create electricity. No, there is not a huge magnifying glass hovering over the earth to focus the solar rays on creating intense heat, but there are solar power towers that are converting the sun’s rays to electricity. These do not operate like the solar panels on your home or business; they work to harness the heat of the sun, just like the magnifying glass.
This technology uses many large sun-tracking mirrors, commonly referred to as heliostats, to focus sunlight on a receiver at the top of a tower filled with a fluid (usually molten salt). That heated fluid in the receiver is used to boil water into steam, which turns a generator and produces electricity.
But it gets even better. After the molten salt boils the water, it’s pumped into large storage tanks, which are designed to trap the heat and keep the salt molten. When the sun goes down, the molten salt is pumped out of storage and used to boil water again, creating steam and producing electricity when the sun is not shining. Twice the production from the same solar energy.
According to my research, there are ten thermal solar power stations in the United States, which are meeting the electric needs of over 500,000 people, but only two are solar power towers, the rest are solar troughs (which is the same concept, without the tower). The solar reflectors are U-shaped, and there is a pipe filled with molten salt running above the reflectors. Thus, instead of focusing the sun’s reflection on a tower, it is focused on the pipe running above the trough.

Sign up to receive all the latest news and information from Scott!
Black Friday: Thankfully Does Not Refer to Electrical Blackouts
21 DECEMBER, 2017 Many Americans every year set their clocks to go off in the wee hours of the morning, or don’t get any sleep at all, on the Friday after Thanksgiving in order to participate in America’s unofficial national holiday: Black Friday. The story goes that...
The Cost of Electric Sex
7 NOVEMBER, 2017 Last week’s blog came about due to a discussion in my office about the best holiday movies of all time. We had a rousing debate about the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles and whether it qualifies as a holiday movie, which led us to calculate the...
Innovators of Energy: Episode 1, The Rebate Bus
Twitter LinkedIn facebook Youtube Instagram