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ah yes the bird blaster
It’s called CSP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
why are there 2 people in suits?
men in black
The third guy was busy that day.
Someone needs to take credit for the work of engineers and manual laborers.
gotta dress up to visit the machine god
don’t wanna insult the machine god with my shabby shoes. wear my fancy shoes.
Mandatory clothing in our utopian solarpunk society of course
Human sacrifices to the Turbine Gods.
Have we even tried powering our turbines with CEO blood?
Stock assets to show scale, probably.
This is old technology that is more expensive/complicated/maintenance-ey than PV. An economic falacy is that if you have oil/fossils you should use that instead of solar. It’s always better to use cheapest energy. Export the fossils, import solar. It is more jobs to have solar as well, and in fact most of the deployment costs are local work/materials (wiring/support structures).
now hear me out. what if we just boiled water in it. why do we have to get all fucky with it.
I really like the concentrated solar systems that use molten salt, where rather than heating water directly, molten salt is heated and stored In large insulated tanks and tapped off to a heat exchanger to run the turbines, thus allowing power generation to match demand and continue at a constant rate even when light level very (such as at night).
One interesting idea is to use a concentrated solar system to run an Einstein–Szilard refrigerator, or some other absorption refrigerator cycle.
What are the tanks made of? “Molten salt” sounds like it would fuck up most materials
Nokia 3310s.
guys its literally in fallout, so its canon.
They can’t keep getting away with this!!
It turns out spinning things is really useful and boiling fluids is a convenient way to spin things.
It’s still funny that so much boils down to steampunk with a fake mustache.
boils down to
I see what you did there!
Not enough brass, though
Wait, it’s all steampunk?
Always had been.
“I’ll try spinning! That’s a good trick!”
But spinning is so much cooler than not spinning!
Wisdom from a Jedi born to bring balance to things.
But not to be a master.
As an old Jedi Master once said, “[Masters] are what they grow beyond”
Yes, Everything, always turns back to mechanical enginnering.
carcinization but for steam engines instead of crabs
Solar thermal is kinda obsolete I thought, now China is churning out PVs for pennies.
Solar thermal has some distinct advantages when you start talking about really big instillations. Especially when considering power storage, molten salt systems can store heat and allow the generators to keep working even at night. Much cheaper than batteries at very large scales.
Thermal solar systems are generally very efficient when the goal is heating something, not just generating power. So say, you want to run an ammonia plant without burning natural gas, or if you want to melt down metals for recycling. There are so many industrial applications where it’s a better way of doing it than using an electric heating element.
But t solar boiler can still be useful in some cases. Where heated water in “solar” on the roof is used immediately for shower etc.
Modern solar into a modern heat pump is gonna be more efficient than heating water. It’s also more versatile and convenient, cause it maintains that efficiency when you pull power from the grid at night. And of course lets you use the power for other purposes.
I agree. But installing a waterboiler on a roof right above a shower is a lot simpler and probably still cheaper, for example in a camping hut situation, so off grid
Lots of huts probably have an ac or heater. This could all be the same device, at which point it’d definitely be easier than running the pipes for water and maintaining pumps and a dedicated tank.
Don’t see a reason you couldn’t have a simple ac window unit that also has a warm water port, which you plug a single cable into going straight to your pannels on the roof.Edit: And once batteries are more affordable (or if you have a few grand to burn) you can then plug in a battery pack conveniently on the indoors side of your window unit.
The indoors side can just have a few regular outlets you can extension cord around to where you need them.
I mean it seems the more complex solution in deployment for sure, but its design could still have use in low heat industrial uses (sub 250°C, e.g. food prep, textile, sanitation etc.) where it is used heat -> heat rather than heat -> electricity -> heat. Maybe these replace thermal collectors eventually.
But that is not the point of this meme at all, just my thoughts.
IDK, heat pumps are basically multiplying the electricity they use.
Only with small temperature differences, the higher the difference the lower the COP.
You need a giant asterisk there. That “small temperature difference” is -40° to 120°F
I really don’t get where those temperatures come from? I was referring to something like this. The higher the temperature difference between cold and warm side, to worse the COP gets. If you wanted to go from ambient to 200°C, the COP would drop lower than 1 and you’d be better off using an electric boiler.
For heating I’d guess it can still be relevant. As a means of producing electricity though? Yeah
Everybody with a college course in Thermodynamics.
It all boils down to steam…
heat transfer fluid is circulated
solar battery pumps?
At least hydro and wind power are still safe from the boiling water…
Hydro is the OG boiled water.
Sun heats water. Water evaporates. Go up high. Falls down. Turn turbine.
Wind power is a side effect of the same process happening on a rotating globe.
Still safe so far
Punches below the belt. Right in the photovoltaics.
