Credit: Scientific American, Aug 4, 2014
These experiments are great and I see a lot of future for solar heat based innovations meeting a lot of energy needs of the future. How about today? We have always been wondering what is available commercially and what is feasible TODAY. And, that is mid-temperature or low-temperature industrial heat – 70 Deg C to 120 Deg C. A whopping 100 GW+ of potential in the world exists for industrial applications that use these range of temperatures.
Instead of just focusing on centralized solar electricity generation – or steam generation – we should somehow make efforts to use the existing commercial technologies for meeting this high demand, that is currently burning fossil fuels.
Generally, solar is more suited for decentralized onsite generation of energy.
We have been fortunate to get opportunity to install 3 large systems in India – 210 KW, 630 KW and 360 KW each – for industrial heating. We have implemented all these systems on shed-type trussed industrial rooftops. WWF recognizes this as a “Climate Solver” innovation