Posted by: Remi
03/03/2008, 11:35:35
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When we were in Spain we saw a lot of solar power stations. There was one in particular that attracted my attention. It's somewhere between Madrid and Valencia if I remember correctly. It has a field of reflectors all of which are aimed at a tower where the beams converge to produce very high temperatures for producing steam which then drives generators. Interesting concept. (There were a lot of wind turbines seen from our bus window on the trip from Madrid to Valencia.) And there's something else about solar power that I haven't heard anyone mention. When we capture solar power with those photo-voltaic cells, the space under the array of cells is cooler than it would have been had the array not been there. The energy generated by the voltaic cells then goes to drive all kinds of electric devices. None of these devices is 100% efficient, and much of the energy is converted back into heat. But some of it goes into the movement of mechanical devices. I suppose that if we traced the energy through all the different channels it traverses that maybe all of it goes back into heat eventually. I'm not sure about this. Does anyone know the answer? If some of the energy is never transformed into thermal energy, we would have a slight bit of global cooling resulting from the use of solar arrays.
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