Many of us have seen solar power plants of this type, and making primitive versions of these mirror dishes was the goal for some of us, for example this case...
Some of this stuff would be very easy to copy or modify.
The collected thermal energy can then be conducted into a working fluid whose thermal expansion can be leveraged to push pistons which crank a driveshaft (like a steam engine) or blast in high pressure jets through rotor blades (such as a turbine). This rotary kinetic motion can then turn a generator.
It’s also possible to set up a thermocouple to generate voltage. It doesn’t pack a lot of ‘oomph’ but it’s allegedly low maintenance, and only as unreliable as the weather is (instead of creating additional unreliability on top of weather fluctuations.)
Means exist to store the thermal energy in a well insulated ‘reservoir’ containing of a large volume of some working fluid with a high thermal capacity and bleeding that thermal energy out as needed, but … well… heat is already waste. my gut can be very wrong but nevertheless my gut still tells me that if i want to store energy that is collected as heat, it is not ideal to leave it as heat, because heat is waste and heat dissipates. The impulse I have is to try to convert it to another form of potential energy that has some kind of metastable storage state. I mean shit, even if it’s hoisting a heavy object to the top of a slope so i can extract the kinetic energy as it rolls back down, the heavy object at the top of that slope isn’t going to rapidly cease to exist before my eyes just because i left it alone; as long as it’s chocked and secured, it will be ready to roll (literally) when I need it to and not before (brooking some direct physical disruption).
so… big fuckin batteries, or that prodigious concentrated heat can be used to thermally depolymerize some organic waste like plastic to turn it into a slurry of monomers that can be refined into a synthetic internal combustion fuel. Or a shit ton of compressed air in a tank, i dunno. Because batteries aren’t very easy for someone to just cobble together out of consumer grade materials but most hardware stores have compressed air tanks available and shit.
Keeping the energy thermal avoids a conversion step, and hence one area of inefficiency, especially as we use a lot of our energy for heating. There’s been some interesting progress on heat batteries which would pair well with a solar concentrator.
A solar concentrator.
The collected thermal energy can then be conducted into a working fluid whose thermal expansion can be leveraged to push pistons which crank a driveshaft (like a steam engine) or blast in high pressure jets through rotor blades (such as a turbine). This rotary kinetic motion can then turn a generator.
It’s also possible to set up a thermocouple to generate voltage. It doesn’t pack a lot of ‘oomph’ but it’s allegedly low maintenance, and only as unreliable as the weather is (instead of creating additional unreliability on top of weather fluctuations.)
Means exist to store the thermal energy in a well insulated ‘reservoir’ containing of a large volume of some working fluid with a high thermal capacity and bleeding that thermal energy out as needed, but … well… heat is already waste. my gut can be very wrong but nevertheless my gut still tells me that if i want to store energy that is collected as heat, it is not ideal to leave it as heat, because heat is waste and heat dissipates. The impulse I have is to try to convert it to another form of potential energy that has some kind of metastable storage state. I mean shit, even if it’s hoisting a heavy object to the top of a slope so i can extract the kinetic energy as it rolls back down, the heavy object at the top of that slope isn’t going to rapidly cease to exist before my eyes just because i left it alone; as long as it’s chocked and secured, it will be ready to roll (literally) when I need it to and not before (brooking some direct physical disruption).
so… big fuckin batteries, or that prodigious concentrated heat can be used to thermally depolymerize some organic waste like plastic to turn it into a slurry of monomers that can be refined into a synthetic internal combustion fuel. Or a shit ton of compressed air in a tank, i dunno. Because batteries aren’t very easy for someone to just cobble together out of consumer grade materials but most hardware stores have compressed air tanks available and shit.
Keeping the energy thermal avoids a conversion step, and hence one area of inefficiency, especially as we use a lot of our energy for heating. There’s been some interesting progress on heat batteries which would pair well with a solar concentrator.
Note: Haven’t actually read the article, but in general the idea of heat storage is a tried and true energy storage method.