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Spaceman meme
“It’s just boiling water?”
“Always has been”
ah yes the bird blaster
I know this is a meme community but I was curious about this. It seems some birds do get burned, but not blasted. It varies a lot depending on the installation and it can also be mitigated. Also, the amount of birds dying from this is significantly lower than just the amount of birds hitting windows. For the benefit of other curious people, I’ll try to condense the relevant information from wikipedia and the sources.
In more general terms, a 2016 preliminary study assessed that the annual bird mortality per MW of installed power was similar between U.S. concentrated solar power plants and wind power plants, and higher for fossil fuel power plants.
How it was calculated for fossil fuel
Sovacool estimated avian mortality from fossil fuel power plants across the United States as a result of collision with infrastructure, electrocutions, pollution and contamination, and climate change. In addition, Sovacool estimated climate change-induced avian mortality (in terms of habitat loss and changes in migration) predicted to be the result of fossil fuel power plant operations.
A preliminary assessment of avian mortality at utility-scale solar energy facilities in the United States: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148116301422?via=ihub
Review of Avian Mortality Studies at Concentrating Solar Power Plants: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1364837
It’s called CSP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
why are there 2 people in suits?
even the Mormons are solar now?
men in black
The third guy was busy that day.
gotta dress up to visit the machine god
don’t wanna insult the machine god with my shabby shoes. wear my fancy shoes.
Your machine god likes fancy shoes 😂 Embarrassing.
The generic suits depicted are sacrificial “meat candles”. They do what they sound like, and everyone knows shoes just kinda get in the way and slow things down. Simple as. Power don’t flow the same without a few of these suits startin to sizzle just right, oughta have yer meat candles primed before ya start 'er up.
Fancy shoes! The things ya read on the Internet, by golly.
Someone needs to take credit for the work of engineers and manual laborers.
Human sacrifices to the Turbine Gods.
Have we even tried powering our turbines with CEO blood?
Mandatory clothing in our utopian solarpunk society of course
Stock assets to show scale, probably.
This is old technology that is more expensive/complicated/maintenance-ey than PV. An economic falacy is that if you have oil/fossils you should use that instead of solar. It’s always better to use cheapest energy. Export the fossils, import solar. It is more jobs to have solar as well, and in fact most of the deployment costs are local work/materials (wiring/support structures).
now hear me out. what if we just boiled water in it. why do we have to get all fucky with it.
The ultimate bird bath
guys its literally in fallout, so its canon.
nice, thanks!
heat transfer fluid is circulated
solar battery pumps?
I really like the concentrated solar systems that use molten salt, where rather than heating water directly, molten salt is heated and stored In large insulated tanks and tapped off to a heat exchanger to run the turbines, thus allowing power generation to match demand and continue at a constant rate even when light level very (such as at night).
One interesting idea is to use a concentrated solar system to run an Einstein–Szilard refrigerator, or some other absorption refrigerator cycle.
What are the tanks made of? “Molten salt” sounds like it would fuck up most materials
Various common steels with a bunch of insulation around it usually, sometimes with a thin coating. The potassium/sodium/calcium nitrate mixes that are used with concentrated solar systems operating in range between 200 C and 600 C. So like, yah you don’t want to touch it, but it’s not gonna do much to steel. It can be somewhat corrosive, but, this is fairly easily mitigated by design.
Molten salt for heat transfer and thermal storage is a pretty mature technology that goes way back before we started using it in concentrated solar systems.
Molten salt for heat transfer and thermal storage is a pretty mature technology that goes way back before we started using it in concentrated solar systems.
Isn’t the core problem with anything that uses molten salt is that when the heat
saucesource (thanks autocorrect, really, the context in that sentence means you should suggest “sauce”?) fails you just end up with a huge lump of solid salts that clog every part of your system?The Russian Alfa class had a similar problem due their use of lead-bismuth heated into a liquid.
When they lost power for whatever they’d essentially end up being written off as reheating them was incredibly difficult and very tricky.
As a first guess, I would use glass fused to steel tanks. I would need to do a detailed look at material compatibility, talk to vendors, and run some bench scale studies before I moved forward with anything.
Source: am licensed engineer
Nokia 3310s.
If you’re gonna build it, you might as well over-build it I guess…
Yes, Everything, always turns back to mechanical enginnering.
carcinization but for steam engines instead of crabs
They can’t keep getting away with this!!
wait these could be built with co2 turbines as well, right??
Yes, super critical CO2 turbines can work in such a system. As can sterling engines. Or thermoelectric solid state couples.
Any system that uses a temperature differential to generate power can be used. It’s just a matter of what you care about in a given situation. Upfront cost, mechanical reliability, noise/vibration, and availability of needed components play in to what makes the most sense.
Everybody with a college course in Thermodynamics.
It turns out spinning things is really useful and boiling fluids is a convenient way to spin things.
“I’ll try spinning! That’s a good trick!”
But spinning is so much cooler than not spinning!
Wisdom from a Jedi born to bring balance to things.
But not to be a master.
As an old Jedi Master once said, “[Masters] are what they grow beyond”
It’s still funny that so much boils down to steampunk with a fake mustache.
boils down to
I see what you did there!
Not enough brass, though
Wait, it’s all steampunk?
Always had been.
Would solar boilers be more efficient than PV?
Another thread I read said that photovoltaics have an efficiency of around 45%, while turbines are somewhere in the 40% range. Source: I dunno.
PVs max out around 28%
Turbines are over 90% efficient.
Traditional Rankine cycles with a boiler, a turbine and a condenser have efficiencies lower than 40%, I’ve never seen one higher than 30%.
No, neither will it be cheaper.
People stopped building those some years ago.
(But those incredibly expensive concentrators with a single tower are more efficient. Nobody is building those anymore either.)
They used to be cheaper. Solar is bananas cheap now
Generating electricity by boiling water used to be the cheapest option, but nowadays it’s a bottleneck that itself is way more expensive than the alternatives that people actually build.
It only got cheaper with time, though. It’s the alternatives (PV, wind, batteries, gas) that improved a crazy amount.
I assume not efficient enough to justify cost
Turns out that sunlight is very cheap. You need a lot of efficiency to justify any extra cost.
Plus, you get a lot of lag when heating water with concentrated solar. Overnight your water cools down, so you need time to get it back to boiling temperature before it can generate any power. That lag gets worse during winter and cloudy days
In some ways, that lag is good. You can cheaply replace batteries with just a thermal mass.
But it’s not good enough to make up for the cost difference.
The sunlight spent just to get the water up to temperature is also wasted, so the maximum extractable energy per day gets kneecapped
PV panels have very low maintenance needs
Punches below the belt. Right in the photovoltaics.
