Researcher Pushes Enormous Floating Solar Islands
By NunoXEI • May 22nd, 2008 • Category: Blog
Swiss researcher Thomas Hinderling wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power.
He’s the CEO of the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique, a privately held R&D company, and he’s already received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility in that country.
The islands will consist of a plastic membrane loaded up with solar concentrating mirrors floating above the water. The mirrors are used to heat liquid to turn it into steam, which drives a turbine that generates energy.
On land, this type of electricity generation is fairly well known. So-called solar thermal plants are emerging as a leading alternative to fossil fuel power plants for future energy generation, with two of Google’s three alt-energy investments coming in solar thermal companies.
But why head to the ocean to create solar thermal power? Hinderling claims that the entire platform can be turned to align with the sun, generating maximum efficiency without a complicated tracking system. The company’s production schedule has it splashing a 1500-foot in diameter platform into the water at the end of 2010.
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NunoXEI is Co-Founder of TheGreenRocket.com and self proclaimed internet-surfing-guru. You can find his personal blog at NunoXEI.com, the home of his podcast, The Lowdown, his comic-related properties and his webcomic, Republic Domain.
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Developing solar thermal power plants, for utility scale sun juice, is a better go than using the PV technology in this application. More bang for the buck basically. To create this on the water, “solar islands”, is a cool idea with probable advantages and disadvantages all its own. Siting will be critical of course, sheltered bays only need apply. Imagine your investment sinks, for whatever reason, what a shame. If the expense saved on tracking systems is that substantial, ok, but I have the feeling that novelty is an even more compelling reason behind this. Solar Islands, sweet!
Let’s hope an ocean location would not have any effect on the ecosystem/wildlife below and around it. Thinking about the ‘paradise’ island locations in Dubai and how they are simply destroying the environment around it.
I think this is a really good idea for the following reasons:
-land is expensive (I’ve looked into it as I’m starting a not-for profit electric company)
-The less land we use for construction on large scale projects like these, the more we can let plant life grow
- as well as capturing solar power they could modify their design to have attached wave generators.
I think this is a bad Idea because:
Phytoplankton which are responsible for converting the air we breath into an oxygen rich environment will inevitably die due to a lack of sunlight. However if they modified their designs again into a checkerboard pattern this can be avoided.
ignore the checkerboard pattern thing I just read the headline and assumed it was going to be a floating island of solar panels lol. This idea’s better at least until we better develop our solar panel technology at least.