Google Plans New Mirror For Cheaper Solar Power
- By Poornima Gupta
- September 11, 2009 |
- 9:14 am |
- Categories: Enterprise, Finance, Investing, Startups
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.
“We’ve been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on,” the company’s green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Google in late 2007 said it would invest in companies and do research of its own to produce affordable renewable energy within a few years.
The company’s engineers have been focused on solar thermal technology, in which the sun’s energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam to turn a turbine. Mirrors focus the sun’s rays on the heated substance.
Weihl said Google is looking to cut the cost of making heliostats, the fields of mirrors that have to track the sun, by at least a factor of two, “ideally a factor of three or four.”
“Typically what we’re seeing is $2.50 to $4 a watt (for) capital cost,” Weihl said. “So a 250 megawatt installation would be $600 million to a $1 billion. It’s a lot of money.”
That works out to 12 to 18 cents a kilowatt hour.
Google hopes to have a viable technology to show internally in a couple of months, Weihl said. It will need to do accelerated testing to show the impact of decades of wear on the new mirrors in desert conditions.
“We’re not there yet,” he said. “I’m very hopeful we will have mirrors that are cheaper than what companies in the space are using…”
Another technology that Google is working on is gas turbines that would run on solar power rather than natural gas, an idea that has the potential of further cutting the cost of electricity, Weihl said.
“In two to three years we could be demonstrating a significant scale pilot system that would generate a lot of power and would be clearly mass manufacturable at a cost that would give us a levelized cost of electricity that would be in the 5 cents or sub 5 cents a kilowatt hour range,” Weihl said.
Google is invested in two solar thermal companies, eSolar and BrightSolar but is not working with these companies in developing the cheaper mirrors or turbines.
In wide-ranging remarks, Weihl also said the United States needs to raise government-backed research significantly, particularly in the very initial stages to encourage breakthrough ideas in the sector.
The company has pushed ahead in addressing climate change issues as a philanthropic effort through its Google.org arm.
Weihl said there is a lack of companies that have ideas that would be considered breakthroughs in the green technology sector. After announcing its plans to create renewable energy at a price lower than power from coal, it has invested less than $50 million in other companies.
Weihl said Google had not intended to invest much more in early years, but that there was little to buy.
“I would say it’s reasonable to be a little bit discouraged there and from my point of view, it’s not right to be seriously discouraged,” he said. “There isn’t enough investment going into the early stages of investment pipeline before the venture funds come into the play.”
The U.S. government needs to provide more funds to develop ideas at the laboratory stage, he said.
“I’d like to see $20 billion or $30 billion for 10 yrs (for the sector),” Weihl said. “That would be fabulous. It’s pretty clear what we have seen isn’t enough.”
(Additional reporting by Laura Isensee; editing by Carol Bishopric)
i wonder how they’ll put put small discrete ads on their mirrors?
Power to the people.
The water molecule consists of 2 hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The electron in the hydrogen atom is bound to the proton by an electrostatic charge and an angulur momentum. The angular momentum depends on the speed of light. By flooding the hydrogen atom with hyperspace energy, which has a speed of light of 1 meter/second, the angular momentum term is destroyed and the electron causes the proton to decay into 300 electrons which can be used to generate electricity. Thus water is electrical energy.
So all we gotta do is tap all that hyperspace energy we keep throwing in the trash and we’d have free energy. Why didn’t I thunk of that?
I built a bifilar flat Tesla coil, which can be seen in a photograph of Tesla where he is sitting in front of the coil mounted on the wall, that produces a bucking field due to the electrical current circulating in opposite directions. A glass spherical ball is mounted on a stand over the Ball. By placing your hands across the sphere, the body rocks back and forth for six seconds and then stops and then repeats. It might be possible to mount an arm on this device to produce a mechanical torque to produce energy. The hyperspace energy flowing through the hand chakras creates a circular co-gravitational field, similar to the magnetic B field, so that when you put your hands together, as in prayer, you have a cylindrical gravitational field between the hands. This field is what causes a pendulum to swing in circles over the hand chakra. The energy leaves the right hand and enters the left hand. There is probably some interesting modification to the pendulum so that electrical current could be sent up the pendulum thread/wire and thus generate electricity. Notice that Newton’s gravitational G constant is equal to the speed of light squared divided by the linear mass of the universe. The G constant can be amplified by more than 10^11 by using 1 meter/second, .078 kg/m hyperspace energy. This produces an enormous space-time curvature and hence a force that can propel spacecraft, provide lift and generate energy. It is time to think outside the mental block.
Time to bust this monopoly up.
Review your antitrust laws classics: a monopoly is dangerous when the dominant position results in abuse.
As far as the don’t… well they stick to their motto: don’t be evil…
Maybe they want to cut the cost in energy generated by each query?
@JohnStClair: You becoming one of my favorite commenters on Wired. Do you have a blog or something I could read? Seriously… I absolutely love your non sequitur techno-babble.
OKAY I SIGNED UP JUST TO SAY THIS……
The first line or sentence of this article is insane. “disappointed with the LACK OF IDEAS…”….lol
OKAY WHOEVER SAID THAT OR WROTE THAT CLEARLY HAS NO IDEA WHATS GOING ON IN THE GREEEN/RENEWABLE ENERGY INDUSTRY AND IS CLEARY IGNORANT AND AN IDIOT. am in the industry and know quite a lot.
Reducing cost by a “quarter or more” means 25 to 30% reduction. That’s not a radical reduction. The article later talks about reduction by “at least a factor of two, “ideally a factor of three or four.”” (50%, 66%, or 75% respectively). Maybe the author meant reducing cost TO a quarter OR LESS? Let’s do ao little proof reading people…
Google, if you can come up with some ideas to fix everything else that is wrong, I would greatly appreciate it.
Curiosly, when there was a military advantage to be gained, the nuclear industry enjoyed hundreds of billions in investments (back when that was a lot of money.) During that time, and since, investments in alternatives have been laughable … in the low millions.
We were supposed to have elected a president who gets it, and who appointed Chu, who’s also supposed to get it. Then along came hundreds of billions of stimulus money. So far I’ve heard about two nuclear plants at a cost of $30+ billion.
Clearly, actual *concern* and *investment* in energy sources remains at a trivial level. Clearly the US government is unlikely (being largely disabled by stupidity and greed) to invest wisely in the future of its people. As disappointment shades into panic, it’d be great to see a few more companies that see the opportunity and the necessity.
A rather far out means to develop our technology is this. Human beings were created for the purpose of winning the battle of Revelations. It was won in 2001 with the help of the Pleiadians. After that, the Pleiadian Federation, which is 440 light years away, expanded from the original 100 planets to 600 planets from around the galaxy. No more planets could join. However, because humans helped win the battle, it was written into their law books that Earth could at any time transition into the Federation. This means that we would be given the Beamship and the simulators to train our pilots to fly it. They would send transition teams to Earth to update our technology in energy generation. It is time to think outside the mental block.
I liked the phrase “non sequitur techno-babble because it implies a pre-science of looking for patterns in a breadth-first search of ideas in different fields of investigation. Because there are so many concepts that are related to each other, the ideas flow together in a non sequitur manner. Scientists on the other hand drill down into a subject in a depth-first manner so that they do not see the big picture. I learned techno-babble from reading Physical Review D where the scientists would discuss the particular subject for pages and pages before ever writing down an equation. Thus non sequitur techno-babble is the best combination for developing new concepts and technolgy, other than having it handed to us by others.
“By flooding the hydrogen atom with hyperspace energy, which has a speed of light of 1 meter/second, the angular momentum term is destroyed and the electron causes the proton to decay into 300 electrons which can be used to generate electricity.”
______________________________
I knew I was a fast walker, but I didn’t know I could walk at the speed of light.
If you attend a Matrix Energetics seminar, Richard enters a low speed of light dimension where the stage becomes wavy, like water. He has a hard time walking around. The wormhole-propagating gravitational wave has a 1 meter/second speed which feels like a flag waving in the breeze. This wave is slightly faster than you can walk normally. Notice that the rotors on alien spacecraft turn slowly because they are immersed in low speed of light hyperspace energy. They are actually relativistic at that slow speed.
OK, to the “reporters” who wrote, edited, and proofread this story, how about telling us what the kilowatt hour price is for other energy sources, for comparison purposes? How about some perspective? Do you job, people! It’s not rocket science, but you are falling down at it. F!