Canon PowerShot G10
ƒ/5
24.978 mm
1/2,000
80
Perhaps a puzzle…
Puzzle Series: What is this, or what do you want it to be?
21 responses to “Black Sheep”
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Specifically a solar power tower taken from the tower. Exactly which tower is a harder question.
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That didn’t take long to guess… I think it’s been identified by the first three comments and the fourth & fifth comment made an accurate observation as well. Nice photo, Steve, but I doubt you were at the top, where you would have surely been made into Estonian Toast™.
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Was it some Bond film in which our hero was trapped and strapped atop a tower at a solar array while the reflector panels slowly, unceasingly turned toward him, sure to fry him? My memory fails me….
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One day these will hopefully be replaced with Estonian Crystalsol photovoltaic technology.
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what I first thought was corrosion turns out to be the reflection of the mountain in the area.
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bingo mebooyou – your first three comments were spot on. This is the BrightSource solar thermal research facility in the Negev Desert of Israel. And Shamagu nailed the big picture within minutes of my posting.
Each of the heliostats you see here are flat mirrors (cheap) that tilt on two axes to aim the sun at a 60m-tall boiler tower
They are not blinding because the photo is taken from part way up the tower, below the focal 1000°F hotspot. One mirror is offline.
A 100MW plants uses 50,000 of these mirrors, and the company is actively developing 4,000MW of solar projects in the U.S., including the two largest solar contracts ever (about $10B).
sbove: yes, but I don’t have it with me. Their analysis shows them to be the lowest cost and most reliable of the solar technologies. Compared to a a parabolic trough system, the levelized cost of electricity from a tower system will be 30% to 40% lower (details).
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It’s funny to me that the thing looks like an oil rig (which it eventually replaces)
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Hmmm. This does raise the question of what else you can do with a half gigawatt of steerable thermal power beam. At 40,000 feet I figure you can get most of that power into a football-field size object. How fast can those mirrors track?
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