Civic-Roger

You don't have to be a science major to know that heat rises: Just step into an attic on a hot summer day. But what you might not know is that this basic scientific reality could also help create clean energy for entire cities.

For centuries, architects have taken advantage of rising heat to help cool some structures. Solar chimneys allow the rising air to go out of the building, taking the heat with it.

Today, Australian entrepreneur Roger Davey wants to take advantage of that phenomenon -- with a twist.

He wants to create, capture and control hot air to help power cities. He plans to build a huge solar updraft tower, 2,600 feet tall, in the Arizona desert. As the hot air moves into the tower, it would turn 32 turbines, spinning them fast enough to create mechanical energy, which generators convert to electricity.

His company, EnviroMission, says such a tower can create up to 200 megawatts of power per day, enough to power 100,000 homes. He says they don't intend to put coal or nuclear or alternative power out of business, but want to be a strong, no-carbon emission supplementary source.

"One of the most important things I think that differentiates this from anything else is its ability to produce power as and when required," said Davey, chief executive and executive director of EnviroMission, the company behind the solar updraft tower.

That sets it apart from solar (not available at night) and wind energy (not available on a calm day), which he referred to as "spasmodic."

He also touted its ability to produce power without the use of water to generate electricity. Coal-fired and nuclear plants use massive quantities of water, and solar panels need to be washed frequently to keep them working well.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/02/tech/i...ona/index.html

PurpleStuff

ugh cnn.....what a bunch of bs.

miss_jess

iTrader: (2)

^^^ lol

ol Dusty

iTrader: (2)

And like everything else that makes energy, your taking energy away from one thing and turning it into another, there will always be side effects even with this, short term the lack of heat rising might have a positive cooling effect reversing the global warming trend we currently don't seem to care enough about, but eventually that would probably become a global cooling trend that we don't seem to care enough about.

I personally feel that the answer to our energy crisis, is to suck it up and turn of the AC for the most part and hold off on cranking up the furnace as soon as the temp drops to the same 15 degrees in the fall that turned on our AC in the spring. That and maybe walk to the corner store once in a while instead of taking the SUV out.

D.T.P

^+1

Couldnt have said it any better.

Civic-Roger

That would take care of part of the problem ol Dusty. Trouble is, a lot of people won't do it.

ol Dusty

iTrader: (2)

That is the other major problem with a lot of the solutions we have. We need to mass produce things to bring the cost down to reasonable, justifiable amounts, but we need to diversify our types of power generators, in order to not over stress any of our other resources. Plus the long term effects of some of our solutions seem to be ignored, which is sorta how we got here in the first place. I mean take electric cars, nothing says environmentally friendly like a trunk full of nickle metal hydride.