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Watchers of the Dawn DVD and ebook |
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| A Guide to Stone Circles (New Edition), Aubrey Burl |
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jonm
Joined:
12-07-2011
Messages: 827
from UK
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|  New Message Posted!2012-12-07 16:01
The flying oven is getting more interest than I thought it would. The polar rotation thing seems to be causing a lot of confusion because someone's tried to write up how a polar tracking mechanism could be used with heliostats and someone else on wikipedia has asked them to site sources:
Wikipedia: Heliostat tracking
(sentence starting with "One simple alternative..")
I don't think it could work when used with heliostats, so it'll be interesting to see how the "wikipedia battle" works out.
Well I thought it was interesting; the forum's gone a bit quiet again.
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jonm
Joined:
12-07-2011
Messages: 827
from UK
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| New Message Posted!2012-12-06 09:18
Quote:
| Funny how, to align to the Sun has become a priority, thousands of years after the Megalith Builders made it a priority... |
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True. The problem is the expense of doing so:
Photovoltaic (PV) trackers are at most 15% efficient, have very expensive tracking systems and not particularly good land use ratios:
Parabolic Trackers are quite efficient but horrendously expensive and have exceptionally bad land use ratios when used away from the equator:
Parabolic one-way troughs have the best of both worlds, except that they are still quite expensive and do not produce sufficiently high grade heat to allow generation of fuel (though they can do electricity but not very efficiently)
Then there's the heliostat trackers: Very expensive. They have been built so there must be an economic case for them, but I can't work out how:
There's a number of other ways to do it and fixed PV systems were all the rage for a while (though a lot of companies are now going bust)
The basic problem is that traditional carbon-fuel generation of electricity can be done as low as 3 cents a unit whereas current solar systems work out at (optimistically) a minimum of 20 cents a unit. To make it cheap, the systems need to be fixed. To generate power or fuel, the systems need to concentrate energy by tracking the sun.
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James
Joined:
13-11-2002
Messages: 80
from High Desert
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| New Message Posted!2012-12-05 16:39
Greetings!
Funny how, to align to the Sun has become a priority, thousands of years after the Megalith Builders made it a priority...
/!\
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jonm
Joined:
12-07-2011
Messages: 827
from UK
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| New Message Posted!2012-12-05 16:05
Thought this might be of interest; some of the text in this was directly copied to describe a modern use (though the original 'Stonehenge' text was modified from this original so it's pinged back and forth).
We've had to work all this up a bit earlier than expected (unforeseen events and all that).
There's some Google Earth 3-D models in the link below. These are great fun to play around with (particularly the multi-unit array):
The "California" Array
Any comments on this would be appreciated. It's going to sound really weird but this forum probably knows more about how this form of renewable energy works than green/sustainability forums. I haven't publicised the concept models yet in the community but the "California version" is probably the most important one because it could, at least theoretically, supply the USA with its entire energy needs just using desert land.
[ This message was edited by: jonm on 2012-12-05 16:05 ]
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