In Israeli desert, world’s highest solar tower looks to future | Hacker News Reader

In Israeli desert, world’s highest solar tower looks to future

timesofisrael.com

30 pointsdavidf1822 comments

There is one country that might have the greatest ability to generate solar power, yet it's still not used, Algeria has one of the biggest deserts in the world and the power generated from there could be enough to get rid of a lot of oil generated power.

For a long time, space is not going to be the limiting factor and "small" deserts like Isreal's are sufficient. The limiting factors are more likely infrastructure, logistics, skilled workers, the local energy market, and so on. For these reasons, Algeria is not really in a better position to implement large-scale solar than many other countries.

So do many other countries, anything on the subtropical ridge would have quite a bit of desert and get allot of sun, the size of your desert doesn't have much impact on your ability to generate solar power.

>Energy from a solar tower is “two to three times more expensive to produce than classic electricity plants using carbon or fuel,” said Eran Gartner

Does that include the cost of building the plant? What are the running cost of a solar tower, and what is the expected lifespan vs a coal one?

Cost is typically LCOE - levelized cost - which takes life time, maintenance, fuel, construction, etc into consideration

This is quite a complex topic and you can google and wiki LCOE for all the gory details.

> “Everything is connected by WiFi instead of by cables. The tower and its boiler are also designed to reduce costs. Everything is done to pursue profitability.”

Is WiFi really cheaper than running cables?

I was wondering the same. If Wifi meant no cables needed at all, I could see it (because of lower maintenance costs). But the electricity needed for Wifi and the motors in the mirrors requires cables anyway.

I wondered about this also. Maybe each mirror also has a photovoltaic and battery?

Photovoltaics and batteries are a possibility, electric cables are still cheaper than ethernet ones and when you have to wire such a large surface area those costs probably add up.

Wifi also allows technicians to connect to which ever devices that they are monitoring more easily and if they will have wifi for easy onsite access they might just as well pull everything over wifi.

It's quite common these days to pretty much run industrial monitoring over wifi it reduces quite a bit of costs as the technicians can just come with a smartphone or a tablet and connect to the web interface or use some dedicated diagnostic app it's much cheaper than sending them out with laptops and connecting directly or having them to use even more expensive dedicated diagnostic equipment.

Israel has also been a long-time user of solar water heaters. According to this article, about 1 million households for a population of 8 million use them.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-03-26/at-the-zen...

AFAIK the building code requires all residential buildings to be built with solar power heaters, they are usually augmented by either an electrical heating element within the heater itself or by a secondary gas/fuel oil heater.

These heaters have been used since the 50's it's nothing more than a few pipes running through a sheet metal frame with a glass cover to force a greenhouse effect they are highly effective and extremely cheap to produce those panels cost near nothing and were implemented very early on when Israel had very little access to overseas fuel sources.

Israel didn't had access to regional oil until the the Iranian coup in 1953, it lost its access to Iranian oil in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, however the same year Israel and Egypt signed the camp david accords and Egypt started supplying Israel with Oil starting January of 1980.

Ironically the Iranian revolution quite likely had quite a positive effect on Israel as it quite likely pushed them to finalize the negotiations with Egypt and to sign an agreement as fast as possible in order regain some access to a regional oil source.

Classic typical misleading statistics in this article.

Energy is 1% of Israel's gross capacity plus this is solar so it only provides daytime loads which makes the economics worse.

Google's major investment in solar thermal has already gone bust. This is a small financial disaster. The economics of solar thermal are crap. Mirrors break or stop tracking well a lot in high winds of a dessert.

Any problems with a steam turbine atop a high tower are costly to fix.

The big advantage of this type of solar over photovoltaics is that they continue producing electricity after the sun sets, so can act as base load stations. Typically, the bigger the tower, the longer it can generate, hence the need for big projects and investments.

Do you think it would be reasonable for a hobbyist to build their own molten salt storage system nick?

You didn't read the article closely enough.

> this is solar so it only provides daytime loads which makes the economics worse.

No, they have reservoirs that store heat for the night. Providing energy at night is one of the strength of this system.

> Any problems with a steam turbine atop a high tower are costly to fix.

Again no, the steam is channeled towards the foot of the tower, where electricity is produced.

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