Daily Telegraph
Thursday 29/4/2010 Page: 15
IT SOUNDS like a dodgy spiel from some shonky spiv a system to generate commercial amounts of electricity from just the sun and air. But the CSIRO will build a "tower of power" in Newcastle which does just that. It will be the world's biggest solar power system using a "Brayton Cycle" turbine and is expected to be generating electricity by March. Brayton Cycle turbines do away with the traditional system of water and steam. Instead, heat from 450 mirrors superheats compressed air, which expands through the turbine in the 30m tower to generate power.
"This technology is ideally suited to many parts of Australia that only receive minimal rainfall," said the CSIRO's Energy Transformed Flagship director Dr Alex Wonhas. Although the tower will be used for researching solar technology, a field of mirrors the same size as the CSIRO's experiment could generate enough electricity to power nearly 100 homes. This new facility will allow us to improve our science by using a real world operating solar thermal field to test ways to make the process more efficient and reduce the cost of this clean technology," Dr Wonhas said.
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