According to an article in The New Zealand Herald of 12/04/07, “Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5 billion ($13.5 billion) on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert in northern Africa and the Middle East. More than a hundred of the generators, each fitted with thousands of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to EU member nations. Billions of watts of power could be generated, enough to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs and to allow it to make significant cuts in its carbon emissions. At the same time, the stations would be used as desalination plants to provide desert countries with desperately needed supplies of fresh water.”  The technique used will be the CSP or “concentrating solar power” model which has a hollow water-filled metal tower surrounded by mirrors which focus the sun’s rays on it. Water is turned to steam and powers turbines which make electricity.

This is a similar but slightly different approach to the one being taken by Ausra Inc, which is set to begin construction on giant solar thermal power plants in the US. With backing from venture capitalists, Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc. (JAVA ), Pacific Gas and Electric and Florida Light and Power. The utilities have committed to solar plants that will produce 1,000MW within the decade. Starting with a 10MW Florida plant, the group’s plan is to go to 300MW for FLP. For the Pacific Group, Ausra will start with a 175MW plant. The reason the investors and utilities are willing to invest in this project is because of the technology that Ausra believes will take the cost down below ten cents per KW.

Khosla is so impressed that he predicts that the technology, which uses flat mirrors instead of parabolic mirrors, will revolutionize renewable energy both in the US and developing countries like China and India. Johh O’Donnell, the man responsible for bringing the investors together became interested in the design while reading a paper by University of Sydney professor David Mills. Unlike the nine power stations built in the 1980’s by Israeli company Luz Corp, Mill’s plan uses flat not parabolic mirrors. The Israeli power plants in the Mojave Desert are still generating 354 MW of electricity but costs never fell below 16 cents a KW, which didn’t impress investors. Mill’s design uses the heat of the sun, directly, to make steam from the water instead of oil as Luz did. Mill’s mirrors are cheaper to build and rugged enough to withstand hurricane force winds,
according to an article in Business Week, in October of 2007.

The USA finally relented and stopped blocking an agreement on negotiating a new climate change treaty.  The frustration of the conference with US intransigence, finally came out when Papua New Guinea delegate, Kevin Conrad, challeged the US: “If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please, get out of the way.” A statement directed at James Connaughton who indicated earlier in the week that the US was leading and other countries “…requires others to fall in line and follow”.  Following an outbreak of boos and catcalls by the international delegates at the US,  ambassador Paula Dobriansky relented. 

Ambassador Dobriansky told the conference “We came here to Bali because we want to go forward as part of a new framework.  We believe we have a shared vision and we want to move that forward. We want a success here in Bali. We will go forward and join consensus.”

After spending so much of my personal energy pushing the idea of hydrogen as a storage medium for solar or wind energy, i’ve found some new facts that “Explode the Myth”, bad pun intended.  Simply stated, the idea was that any excess electricity generated by the sun, winds, tides, could be used to make hydrogen from water, as way of storing energy.  At night or in periods when the solar panel isn’t generating electricity, the hydrogen can be used to power a traditional styled, gas fired generator, but without creating carbon dioxide.

First it’s important to point out that the technology of what i have described is available. We can make hydrogen from water, using electrolysis to split the H2 and O2 from the water.  The hydrogen gas can be burnt, without producing CO2, but hydrogen gas will only return 50% of the energy used to split the water that supplied the hydrogen. In other words, it would take 2 tons of hydrogen powering a generator, to produce 1 ton of hydrogen from water.  So if 50% is too low, what is enough?

The 50% energy return on hydrogen may not be too low, rather there are better technologies currently envisioned which have an energy return at or above 70%.  These storage methods include “pumped storage”, compressed air pressure CAES and hydraulic/mechanical systems. In fact a CAES plant in germany has been online since 1978.  So don’t fret over the “loss” of hydrogen, it’s just that there are better ways to naturally generated electricity.

To learn more, check out this article:

http://www.ilea.org/downloads/MazzaHammerschlag.pdf