New Ways to Store Solar Energy for Nighttime and Cloudy Days

This article goes about a way to use solar power to store the energy captured from the sun's rays so that electricity can be used whenever the sun is not shining. The problem is that electricity is hard to store, so it was found that capturing the sun's heat is much more effective. A plant could store heat for hours or even days and then go about selling it at a justifiably higher price after the sun has set.

One competitior has a different technique called a "power tower". It is almost like a water tank except that it is surrounded by hundreds of mirrors tilted at two different axes to capture the sun in the course of the day and in the course of the year. Mr. Murphy's design is for a power tower that can store 540 megawatts of heat. Producing 250 megawatts of electricity, it is enough to run a fair size city. There are some complications especially with the use of molten salt, but there are still designs for the power tower.

For instance, eSolarannounced a program to try to make renewable electricity for less than the price of coal-fired power. Mr. Murphy helped build a power tower in the 90's in California but when natural gas, a competing fuel, collapsed in price. Renewable power was thoguht of as less of a neccessity. Mr Murphy said, "Nobody cared about global warming, and we weren't killing people in Iraq".

The idea of a power tower seemed like it could be such a great success and a way to use renewable energy. However the idea is not being carried out because of other things that seemed to be more important and needed more attention, such as natural gas. This may be the case, but is it still okay to in some way neglect the issue of global warming. It too is an important issue in our world and we still need to address it. Do you think the way that both of these issues are communicated to the public has an affect on what we view as being more important? I definitely think it does and it is hard for a small number of people to get across the idea of global warming and the affects it has on our environment. How do we decide what problems need more attention and need to be addressed first? It is hard to know what really raises a threat to our environment and our world because of the way these issues are communicated.