Australia's sunny solution to energy crisis
Posted
Jun 05 2008, 04:38 AM
by
Jon Markman
Rating:
One of the most awesome things about the world energy shortage is that it has encouraged every wingnut science professor, inventor, entrepreneur and lawmaker with an ounce of moonbeam in their veins to announce a wacky solution. Maybe they can all generate heat just by making us laugh. Where is Rube Goldberg when we really need him?
So as my tip of the hat to World Environment Day – which is June 5, by the way – I would like to call your attention to my new column on solar thermal energy, and my favorite idea, which comes courtesy of the Australian National University.
Australia, you have to understand first, is one of the world’s largest exporters of coal, oil, natural gas and uranium. It’s like a floating strip mine which every resource-hungry nation of the world is doing its best to hollow out. Yet folks there are worried that once the last piece of fossil fuel is carved from of the island, it’ll have nothing left but crocodile tears and a few large cans of beer. So it has embarked on the goal of setting up sunshine as its next bumper crop.
The Aussies’ new project is to build the world’s largest solar parabolic dish – at 5,400 square feet, it’s the size of a city block – that’s composed of 424 mirrored panels. So far, that’s not such a big deal, as there are several giant dishes, or solar “concentrators,” these days in California and Nevada which take reflections from an array of heliostats and use the heat generated to boil a liquid into bursts of steam that turn a turbine and generate electricity.
That’s too easy for the Australians. Instead, the scientist behind this idea, professor Keith Lovegrove, has plans to separately have farmers grow thousands of tons of salt water algae, which he says produce 40 times more biomass than food crops per acre. Once harvested, he would use the power of the solar concentrator to “gasify” them at 1,292 degrees Farenheit in giant pressure cookers. He says the resulting methane gas would be processed into a form of methanol that can, in turn, power up electricity turbines.
You have to admire these folks for thinking big, if nothing else. But don't count on powering your latte with electrons born from sun-smoked Ausssie algae anytime real soon. While you're waiting, read more about Lovegrove and see some pictures here at the blog beyondzeroemissions.org and check out this pdf that illuminates the subject. The United States has investigated making biodiesel from algae. Read about it here. Of course the algae people have their own blog, titled Algaetobioenergy.com.
