Solar Power Generator Distillation

(in progress)

Today’s episode is on the Solar Power Generator (note on name). This is one of the most important projects of the Global Village Construction Set, on a par with the Open Source Fab Lab, and CEB press/Tractor, in terms of productive power. The Solar Power Generator is a solar thermal concentrator (STC) electrical power system. Conceptually, this system is quite simple. Heat from the sun is concentrated by mirrors onto a collector. The heat boils water in the collector tube, and the resulting steam is used to run a steam engine. 70% of the energy in the United States is generated by steam power in large power plants, which use fuel to boil water and run turbines for electrical generation.

We are presenting this video to explain why we think that the Solar Power Generator is important. We aim to explain it in lay terms – to the point that you could understand the potential and the issues involved.

Everyone loves solar energy. But where is its mass adoption? It’s not there. Why not? It is not that there is not enough solar power. Did you know that the solar power coming to the Earth is 8000 times larger than the total energy use on the entire Earth? This means that there is plenty of solar energy, but the trick is to capture that energy into a useful form.

You may have heard that solar energy is ‘too dispersed’ to harness it for electrical power generation. That’s where solar concentrators are used to concentrate solar power to a more usable form for power generation. You can see videos on YouTube that show a solar concentrator melting right through steel.

To summarize what we have so far – there is plenty of solar energy, and it can be concentrated effectively. Or, it can be used in its dilute form by using photovoltaic (PV) panels. So why doesn’t everybody have a solar collector, or PV, and power their house by solar energy, and save an average of $1000 per year in electricity costs, if you are talking about the United States?

The reason is that harnessing solar power is too expensive by present standards. This applies to photovoltaic PV power and solar concentrators. This is changing, as PV panels are down to under $3 per installed watt, at liquidation prices, and solar concentrator power plants are presently down to $1/ installed watt in the desert areas of the USA. This price is comparable to the cost of coal power plants, the main electrical source in the USA.

Solar thermal concentrator power is actually economically feasible today, in sunny areas. While utilities are installing large-scale solar thermal power plants in the desert regions of the USA, such as the company Ausra, at the unit of megawatt scale - no distributed power generation on the unit of kilowatt scale system – or at the scale of individual homes - exists on the market for solar thermal concentrator technology. That is, solar power is not yet available as a cost-effective, distributed power generation option. We are speaking on purely economic terms, not in terms of ecological values.

To reframe our discussion to this point – if solar power were less costly, it would be economically feasible. This is a tautology, but it needs to be pointed out. This seeming tautology also indicates that solar power would be feasible also in areas with less sun than the deserts, if its cost was correspondingly lower. This is important, because it reveals that solar power could be feasible not only in deserts, but most of the temperate zones as well.

The argument of dismissing solar concentrators by virtue of low efficiency is void – the efficiency does not matter in practice if the cost of the power system is low. The figure of merit is not percent efficiency, but cost per watt of power delivered. The point is, if we could develop a low-cost solar concentrator system, it has a chance of widespread adoption because of positive environmental effects.

We are here proposing a design and program for producing cost-effective, off-grid solar concentrator electric systems as an open source initiative. We have a 75 cent per watt design for a basic system, where energy storage is included.

We are aware of the immediate critique of this proposition, and possible premature dismissal by the so-called experts. We know that this cost figure is highly suspect to just about any critic with basic knowledge of solar concentrator power.

However, we are not relying on the several assumptions inherent in such critique. First, we are not using an industrial business model, which has 4-6 fold cost increases over the true cost (materials and labor of production) built into it in the form of engineering and design costs, financing, overhead, stockholder profit, inventory, transportation, and other costs. We are proposing a post-industrial model of Community Supported Manufacturing.

We are proposing at-cost production – where the consumer pays only for materials and labor. Basic analysis of industrial economics reveals the 4-6 price increase above – this is not in question.

We are going further in our cost reduction yet – over and on top of the 4-6 factor of standard industrial inefficiency. Our second step in cost reduction is known as technological recursion – a concept that we coined because we are not aware of another recognized economic term for the same. Technological recursion means that we capture the value that our supply chain would typically capture – by producing the components of the solar power generator in-house. Because outsourcing materials is more expensive than making them in-house, we end up reducing the overall cost of the product. As such, we are capturing not only the value of producing the solar generator, but also the value of producing its components. In practice, this means that our material costs are reduced, and the labor cost increases. All in all, we get paid more because we do more labor. At the same time, your purchase price is lowered. It’s a win-win situation for the producer and consumer.

We will expand on the CSP business model in a dedicated episode. For now, we will discuss how this plays out with solar power generator production.

First, we explain the system, and explain the strategy for optimized price reduction.

What I have explained above is what we call recursionary at-cost production -

We start with simplest possible design.