Solar Tower: Ancient Technology Becomes a Modern Power Option

In a field near the quaint little town of Manzanares, Spain, stands a structure which can be seen from miles away. At more than 580 ft high, it is an imposing glass-like tower surrounded by 11 acres of thick transparent sheeting suspended a few feet above the ground. Underneath this covering, where the base of the tower meets with this sheeting, can be heard a whooshing noise marked by the sound of huge propeller blades slicing the air.

You think to yourself, this is a strange thing to lay eyes upon. It is something truly bizarre. Something powerful. Not surprisingly, it literally is powerful. It is a machine designed to capture energy, using a method that has been around for thousands of years!

THOUSANDS OF YEARS GO, AN ACCIDENT HAPPENED

Thousands of years ago, some of our ancestors started building houses to keep the wind, rain and the winter cold out. Great idea! Later they put chimneys on them so the family could make a fire and get even more heat. Wow! Well, it didn¡¦t take long to run across what we now call the engineer¡¦s dilemma: out of one great solution was born another great problem. During the winter, the house was cozy and warm. But during the summer, it got hot and afforded poor circulation. What to do?

Some smart citizen observed that during a windless summer day her family¡¦s house amazingly always had a nice breeze going. A breeze inside the house? On a windless day? And only in this house and not in the others! How was this possible? After a while, the house became the place to hang out. The neighbors started lazing about all summer day, eating all the food, and teaching the kids dirty jokes. Eventually something had to be done.

What was different about this family¡¦s house? Why did it make its own breeze, while the others didn¡¦t?

Sure enough, someone noticed there was something different about the chimney.

BAD FASHION CAN BE GOOD

Sure, the chimney was made out of clay like all the other houses in the neighborhood. But when they made this house, they ran out of that fashionably light-colored clay the rest of the house was made of. In a pinch to get the house completed on time, this family went ahead and used an unfashionably darker clay to make their chimney. At first, people laughed at their house with the funny chimney. But now maybe there was something cool going on with that chimney.

A dark colored chimney. Therein lay the difference that made a difference. Little did these folks know, the chimney was a harvester of solar power. Here¡¦s how it worked...

The dark color of the chimney absorbed the sun¡¦s rays during the day. The sunlight heated the walls of the chimney. This heat in turn radiated inward and heated up the air within the chimney. This hot air did just like the gas in a hot air balloon: it went up. Immediately the escaping air was displaced with air drawn from below, within the house. This air from below was in turn heated within the chimney like the air before it. So, it rose upwards, and was displaced from fresh air below... And this went on and on as a continuous cycle - which resulted in a breeze being created within the house.

Thus was born a simple form of solar energy capture which has been around from times ancient.

BACK IN MODERN-DAY SPAIN: A SOLAR TOWER

Zoom back to modern times in Spain - home of our beloved flamenco music and loads of very strong Arabic coffee. The Spanish village of Manzanares is steeped in old traditions. You would think it could hardly be the place for modern marvels. But it is.

Manzanares was recently put on the map as a site for a gigantic rendition of our ancestors¡¦ solar chimney: a solar tower. At 195 meters, one can easily see it from the distance, and quite naturally it¡¦s a great place as a tourist attraction. Before arriving at the tower itself, a tourist would have to stop and get out of the car. It¡¦s surrounded by hectares of clear plastic sheeting suspended at head-room height.

The sun¡¦s rays beat through the clear plastic sheeting and strike the ground surrounding the tower. The ground heats up and produces hot air which rises upwards. This hot air is trapped by the sheeting and builds up pressure. This pressure seeks release, and finds it at the center of the sheeting. At the center is a gaping hole which travels upwards into the massive tower¡¦s upright column. With such a large area underneath the sheeting building up such pressure, the movement developed through its upward release produces a powerful wind - powerful enough to produce loads of electricity.

It works well in windy weather, on cloudy days, and it even works at night while heat still rises upwards from the ground! Just like our ancestors¡¦ solar chimney, the Manzanares solar tower captures the sun¡¦s rays, and delivers this power in a way similar to the primitive clay chimney.

MORE ON THE WAY

The Manzanares tower is a mere toy. It is proof-of-concept for a much larger project on the way. The engineers who built the original tower are making plans for a much larger tower, this time to built in Australia, with another one in China. We can expect to see these showing on the landscape within the next few years. They will be built as commercial ventures, and its makers will sell the energy they produce.

LESSONS LEARNED

Two important lessons we can learn from the solar tower:

- We can look to the past for ideas on new power. This technology has been around for a long time. Why have we only recently been publicly recognizing this technology?

- Energy can easily be delivered through means we may not expect. At the solar tower, the sun¡¦s energy was not captured by solar cells, which is the first thing we may think of when we think ¡§solar power¡¨. Instead, at the tower, the sun¡¦s energy was converted into wind, which was then turned into electricity generated by propeller blades.

Let¡¦s continue to look and build. But let¡¦s hurry up, huh?

- John

Read John's other articles at: http://www.associatedcontent.com/johnmelendez

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