Since 1990, four windmills in Vollerwiek have been producing 2 MWatts of energy at a very constant average. The production has been rather stable because near the coast one low-pressure area is followed by the next, and in between, there is always east wind.
The first problem was: how to store the energy that cannot be fed into the network? I speculated about pump storage or water division. But … in reality the wind farmers did not take any extra pains in order to make their energy usable!
At school – I am a physics teacher – you find it hard to prevail if you want to sell such a sketchy technological concept. Students will ask: What if there is no wind? What if the sun does not shine? The alternative technologies get stuck in a lack of credibility.
“New York, the city that never sleeps”, but Cairo and Munich, too, never sleep. Today, we must assume that all civilizations need a basic supply of electric energy. Given a little research, I am sure the amount of it, for instance in Middle European countries, can be determined. And with a few calculations, based on a) the solar constant S= 1,3 kW/m^2 and b) the formula for the efficiency degree w = (T1-T2)/T1, you get an idea about the required area for absorbers and the energy storage in GWh.
DesertTec symbolizes a new approach to alternative technologies, because it is the first time a significant mistake of Green industrial politics is rectified: this is not about spreading bounties among the population and distributing capital right, left and centre. Instead, what we are talking here is providing civilization with electric energy. So what is new about DesertTec? First and foremost, it is low-tech. Many components have been known since the 1970ies.
MAN developed the Solar-Man ready for production, but could not market it. What is new is a global view, the conquest of frontiers. I attribute it to us getting used to a global concept promoted by galactic pictures and satellite technologies. An idea like “let us make use of the sun in Spain or even in the Sahara” no longer seems unrealistic or absurd. What is also new about the project DesertTec is the wish to make solar energy capable of carrying basic load through energy storage technologies.
“Technologically interesting … wish”? For me, that means that the project has an ethical dimension that was totally absent in former solar technological investments. As I see it, the ethical dimension is the wish to bring the project civilization to future generations, instead of just a classical subsidy policy.
During the last lessons of the semester, when I – in typical teacher fashion – studied www.desertec.org with my students, they were surprised and asked: Why do we need energy storage? After all, we could build an entire chain of power plants and thus always produce on the sunny side… Hm, thinks the teacher, basically, they are correct, it is τέχνη, but they will have to do it themselves. It is definitely a little presumptuous ὕβρις,
WL
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
I added the picture of the Britzer Mühle as I found it in wikipedia under Windmühle to the article.
🙂 And here is a little propaganda for wikipedia. Of course, you can also find the big Desertec project in the great wikipedia.
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