#heliostat

[supplyside]

Gemasolar 15MW solar plant, Seville, Spain

[gregdotorg]

In addition to the windows of handblown glass the color of the rainbow, Olafur Eliasson installed a heliostat across the street from the St Nikolai Cathedral in Greifswald, Germany, so that instead of once, sunlight would hit the windows multiple times each day.

image: Olafur Eliasson, Window for Moving Light, 2024, photo by Jens Ziehe

[earthstory]

Ivanpah Solar

This is an image taken from the ISS of Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station in the Mojave Desert outside of Las Vegas.

This facility has three towers and a series of 173,500 mirrors known as “heliostats”. The towers pump water through them which is heated by sunlight reflected off the mirrors and focused on the towers. That hot water is then turned into electricity. The mirrors are specially designed and computer-controlled to individually rotate during the day, keeping the maximum amount of sunlight focused on the towers. At the time this image was taken the facility still appears to be under construction; it is nearly complete today.

The linear gash cutting through the image is Interstate-15, the main linkage between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

The mountains to the west are the Ivanpah Mountains, the valley itself is known as the Ivanpah valley. I believe you can see the small town of Primm, Nevada, towards the right side of the image.

Along the side of the mountain range you can see many dry channels where water occasionally pours out of the mountains into the desert, typically during events that are almost flash-floods. In this area, those events probably happen every few years or even every few decades.

There is also a drainage basin coming northward from the New York Mountains, which sit to the south of this site. It is clearly different material, possibly more fine-grained than the other rocks (since it’s farther from the range) and it is draining right towards the town…which probably sits at that site because it’s the location where the water drains to from that valley. That area has all the hallmarks of being a “dry lake bed” out in the Mojave, and has been proposed as a possible site for a new airport in the area.

-JBB

Image credit: NASA/ISS http://ivanpahsolar.com/

Previous TES post on Ivanpah: https://www.facebook.com/TheEarthStory/posts/578884218839293

[photorator]

One Central Park a mixed-use development with vertical gardens The grand cantilever that houses the towers most luxurious penthouses also has a heliostat with motorised mirrors that capture sunlight and direct the rays down to the gardens Chippendale City

[supplyside]

Solar Reserve’s 110MW Crescent Dune plant in Nevada, US, will deliver more than 500,000 MW-hours of electricity per year, and requires zero natural gas. Photograph- Solar Reserve

[supplyside]

Ivanpah - Power controller- Sets of mirrors, called heliostats, are aligned with the tracking systems shown here. Software helps ensure that all of the mirrors move in a coordinated way through the day

[earthstory]

Sunset in the McMath-Pierce Heliostat Heliostats are usually mirrors that compensate for the Sun's apparent motions in the sky and move to always keep the Sun in view. The McMath-Pierce Heliostat is 80” in diameter (2m) and is located 30m (100 ft) above the ground. Sunlight that is reflected off the heliostat lands on an image-forming mirror 60” in diameter (1.5m), 150m (500ft) away. The light then bounces off a third mirror which transports the image to underground observing rooms. This allows astronomers to observe images of the Sun about a metre (1 yard) across. -CJ Image: NSO/AURA/NSF Further Reading: http://nsokp.nso.edu/history http://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/html/im0999.html

[swtorfounder]

Done. ☑️ But not fun.