Link Banana

Salon’s Pablo Päster makes clear that the United States could never manage to get all it’s power needs satisfied by solar alone. It seems obvious, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d wondered.

At 12,000 kWh per capita, electricity demand is roughly 3.6 trillion kWh, or the equivalent of 1,200 coal-fired power plants running full-time. To generate 3.6 trillion kWh per year, we would need to install about 1.5 billion square meters of solar panels, or around 586 square miles. This is clearly a lot higher than the number that you had heard and equivalent to one-third of Rhode Island.

This week’s Economist contains the Technology Quarterly, which mean there are probably at least five technology articles that I’ll deem interesting and post here. This one really caught my eye, if only because I love the idea.

But Kennedy & Violich Architecture of Boston, Massachusetts may have the answer. In collaboration with Global Solar Energy of Tucson, Arizona, it has developed a cheap, practical and portable way to capture the sun’s rays by day and release them by night as useful light, wherever it is needed.

I’ve seen many references to new ways of making solar power more efficient recently, The Economist’s article is the only one I bookmarked.

As their name suggests, CSP plants generate electricity by concentrating the sun’s rays, usually to boil water. The resulting steam drives turbines similar to those found at power plants that run on coal or natural gas. There are several different designs. The Nevada plant uses long curved mirrors, called parabolic troughs, to focus light on a tube of fluid running just above them. The Spanish plant uses a forest of smaller mirrors to focus light on a tower in their midst. Other concepts involve long flat mirrors and devices resembling satellite dishes.