🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <01bcc779$f78bdd40$0400a8c0@bahn>,
William L. Bahn <bahn@pcisys.net> wrote:
>One other thing to keep in mind with solar energy - the amount of silicon
>we are talking about as a fraction of the total industrial capacity. For
>the 400MW plant we were discussing, I estimated between 5 and 30 square
>kilometers of panel area and that the steady state panel replacement would
>be on the order of perhaps 500 m^2 per day and more likely it would
>actually be along the lines 6000 m^2 per day. We have a semiconductor fab
>nearby that just made a HUGE expansion from 3000 wafer starts a month to
>30,000 wafer starts a month - if these are six inch wafers that's a total
>wafer area capacity of 18 m^2 per day. So if a solar cell fab turned out
>100 times this volume of production it would still take the total
>production of two or three of them just to supply this one plant with
>enough modules to replace the ones that fail on a daily basis. Not to
>mention the fifty years total production output to supply the initial
>panels to construct the plant. And let's keep in mind that this is for a
>small plant.
>
>One calculation I would like to do is to estimate how much of the current
>semiconductor industry's fab capacity would be required to supply enough
>solar modules to satisfy the electrical production needs of the state of
>California - both initially and the steady state replacement requirements.
>I'm hoping to get some actual information regarding the aggregate capacity
>of the silicon processing industry later this week.

You're doing this the hard way.

Try mirrors (yes, mirrors).  Use an array of them and focus the sun's energy
from a large area (ie: a few acres) onto a water tank on top of a tower.

Now use the energy you just concentrated to boil water (aka: steam).

Use the superheated steam produced to drive a conventional turbine and 
produce electricity.

Anyone who has ever used a magnifying glass of parabolic mirror during the
daytime to ignite combustable material knows damn well what kind of power is
available from even a *small* area illuminated by the sun.

No silicon wafer production required.  All you need is glass (you want a
refractive surface so you get a focus) and reflective material, along with 
the mounting and drive systems to coordinate the mirror's aim during the 
time the sun is in the sky.

Yes, its less efficient (you lose in the reflection and refraction, in the
production of the steam, and all the normal places from steam production
through final generator output).  Its also a *LOT* cheaper to build, 
maintenance is trivial, and you can put one anywhere you can find the 
open land.

There's plenty of energy impacting the earth's surface for this.  The trick
is to concentrate it into an area that allows us to use our "conventional"
means of consumption (ie: electric power) for it.

A side benefit is that the net thermal gain to the atmosphere from such a
plant is *ZERO*.  The amount of energy you collect is spent at the plant;
some goes into electricity, and some goes back into the air (waste heat
which you don't manage to transmit to the superheated steam).  The energy
turned into electricity is also returned to the atmosphere as heat, as is
all the loss during production.  Its a zero-sum game, and as such is the
most environmentally friendly means of doing this you can find.

It also produces no pollution of other forms (the heat thrown off is *NOT*
pollution; it would have been thrown off ANYWAY on the ground originally).

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