Why doesn’t Australia use Solar Power only for electricity Since most of Australia is a hot sunny desert?
by admin on Thursday, May 19th, 2011 | 9 Comments
All you need for a solar power plant to generate electricity is a lot of mirrors
(mirrors that a central computer rotates throughout the day to reflect the sunlight from the best angle to heat the water tank) to reflect the sunlight onto a huge water tank to heat the water that turns the generator.
all you need for solar electricity is about 100 mirrors Maximum
How expensive can it be
probably cuz the panels are expensive and they need the money for something else
The area required for solar power generation for the whole country would be quite large. You would then need to transport the electricity from the generator to the users. Solar power works well locally but it is not efficient if you have to take the electricity hundreds of kilometres. You would also need huge banks of batteries because, as Gerald Ford put it so well, solar power is not something that can come in overnight.
A better use of solar power would be to install solar heating and solar panels on houses to cut the cost of electricity to households and to ease the demand for electricity from conventional power stations.
lol, you can’t put a solar power station in a desert because it’s not only sunny, but it is also dusty, and dust collects on the panels, so you would need frequent cleaning just to take the dust off. Having so much dust is inefficient.
http://www.beyondzeroemissions.org/
Their report (see left hand panel for pdf) outlines a strategy to make Australia solar powered in 10 years. Outlines costs and how to do it.
Solar power is very inefficient and expensive.
It would never be efficient as a sole source of electricity. We do use them though just not on such a large scale as coal, wind and hydro.
The Coal industry would hate that since they will be out of business. Any attempt to design a solar power plant will be criticised by the powerful coal industry.
In WA we are having a wind farm built at a cost of $750M to power the equivalent of 125,000 homes,
the project might finish up a white elephant because of squabbling over connection costs to power grid
We have a desalination plant and another on the way the power required is astronomical apparently.
To produce steam in large quantities using mirrors to produce power would be cost prohibitive too.
I would think generating power by waves would be the way to go, it would operate 24/7, wouldn’t need wind or sun.
We have some areas in WA that could possibly be used geo thermal power generation.
Why don’t you/your family have a solar panel on your roof, a magnetic devise in your cellar (http://www.naturalenergydirectory.com/free-power-blueprint-review) and a wind turbine in your yard?
Because people are only interested in the short term, why would they spend money on this, when its not really needed?
People can choose and create there own power, but how many people actually do?
Sam