Solar mirrors magnify the values and temperatures of sunlight. Multiplying one sun into hundreds of suns is like reflecting one stick of firewood into a truck load of firewood. Solar mirrors enable economic breakthroughs in energy - solar steam and solar power cheaper than coal, five times cheaper than oil, without the cost of fuel and without the pollution of carbon.
Solar dish mirrors recreate the temperatures of surface of the sun at the dish focus. Sunlight focused with a dish mirror can melt holes through steel like a magnifying glass burns holes through paper. This high-intensity solar flux is used to make low-cost steam and power.
Heliostats are ordinary flat glass mirrors tracking the sun to concentrate sunlight onto the tops of solar steam power towers. Heliostats have also melted holes through thick plate steel.
Placing a few solar cells in the intensely bright flux at the focus of a solar dish, or on a solar tower, will increase solar cell power output by over 1000 fold. That is a lot of power from just a few cells.
A solar dish, like an old style TV satellite dish with glass mirrors, can heat and power a home with sunlight. An array of solar dishes or heliostats can steam power a factory. Large heliostat fields can heat and cool whole cities, day and night, summer and winter, using district heating and seasonal heat storage.
Industrial process heat is typically steam generated from burning natural gas. If solar steam is used then natural gas is saved for other applications not available from solar energy, such as generating electrical power at night. This method of using sunlight responds to market concerns that solar power can not be supplied 24 hours per day unless new storage technology is developed.
Scientists know of no other technology more efficient, nor higher quality, than the parabolic dish for collecting radiant energy from distant energy sources in space.
Heliostats can scale quickly over rough terrain, and in urban environments, enabling fast energy growth. Global market size is in the trillions of dollars.
Our two year goal is the startup of international independent indigenous production of solar dish and heliostat systems via global distribution of engineered and tested blueprints on DVDs. We seek extreme high-volume global manufacture of coal cost competitive solar thermal hardware. All of the dish and heliostat components already exist as high-volume manufactured products made from the commodities of cement, steel, aluminum, glass, copper, micro-controllers, and high-performance space photovoltaic cells. No new tooling nor construction skills will be required for technology transfer. No new tooling is intended for rapid growth of deployed hardware from existing independent producers with existing tooling. Tooling capital is not required for startup manufacturing of high-quality reliable solar concentrators.
Blueprint engineering will be contracted with existing consulting engineering firms and tested with existing machine shops.
On May 7, 2007, Cassandra's Green Company was incorporated to manage heliostat engineering and solar dish patent licensees.
Our objectives include global warming mitigation using cost competitive solar technology. We plan to shut down coal with the force of economics.
This summary was written for the engineers that will invent the future and for the investors that will deploy the future.
Doug Wood
Sandra Karlsvik MD
Cassandra's Green Co.