Power station harnesses Sun's rays

There is a scene in one of the Austin Powers films where Dr Evil unleashes a giant "tractor beam" of energy at Earth in order to extract a massive payment.

Well, the memory of it kept me chuckling as I toured the extraordinary scene of the new solar thermal power plant outside Seville in southern Spain.

From a distance, as we rounded a bend and first caught sight of it, I couldn't believe the strange structure ahead of me was actually real.

A concrete tower - 40 storeys high - stood bathed in intense white light, a totally bizarre image in the depths of the Andalusian countryside.

The tower looked like it was being hosed with giant sprays of water or was somehow being squirted with jets of pale gas. I had trouble working it out.

In fact, as we found out when we got closer, the rays of sunlight reflected by a field of 600 huge mirrors are so intense they illuminate the water vapour and dust hanging in the air.

The effect is to give the whole place a glow - even an aura - and if you're concerned about climate change that may well be deserved.

It is Europe's first commercially operating power station using the Sun's energy this way and at the moment its operator, Solucar, proudly claims that it generates 11 Megawatts (MW) of electricity without emitting a single puff of greenhouse gas. This current figure is enough to power up to 6,000 homes.

But ultimately, the entire plant should generate as much power as is used by the 600,000 people of Seville.

It works by focusing the reflected rays on one location, turning water into steam and then blasting it into turbines to generate power.

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UTILITY SCALE PHOTOVOLTAICS

If you can’t make rooftop photovoltaics pay financially without feed in tariffs, tax credits, accellerated depreciation, rebates, and subsidized loans - and even with all that it’s still barely better financially than just sticking to natural gas or coal fired grid electricity - how on earth can something like this succeed at the utility scale?
One reason solar energy still cannot compete financially vs. conventional energy is because the value of future energy output from a photovoltaic system is discounted when calculating, for example, an internal rate of return. But economic models that put a time-value on money - making receipts in the future not worth as much as receipts today - cannot necessarily be applied to energy.

A fairly stealthy, fast growing, vertically integrated photovoltaic company who is staking their strategy on utility scale applications is Optisolar, based in Hayward, California. Owning everything from the manufacturing (and the underlying thin film technology), to the solar fields they build, they have begun construction on what will be the largest photovoltaic field in the world to-date.

It’s interesting that the world’s largest PV array currently is the utility-scale 12-megawatt Erlasee solar park in Germany, and this new 50 megawatt plant built by Optisolar is going to be Ontario, Canada. Interesting because Germany and Canada aren’t necessarily considered the sunniest places on earth.

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How to beat the budget car tax increase

You can still buy a family car or even a 4x4 without paying high car taxes and destroying the planet. Under the new CO2 rules, buy a BMW 3 series or a VW Golf and you could pay up to £750 in tax - or nothing at all



In the short term, the big losers are those driving large petrol-engined cars. Over the next two years they will see their annual road tax bill climb by between £100 and £200.

However, the real shock will come in 2010, when new car buyers face the so-called showroom tax - a higher road tax in the first year that reflects the car's CO2 emissions.

Cars that emit more than 255g of carbon dioxide per kilometre, such as the Ranger Rover Sport and any Ferrari, will come with an £950 bill for the first year's tax - a significant sum, although short of the £2,000-£5,000 demanded by environmental groups.

At the other end of the spectrum, anyone buying a brand new car in 2010 that emits less than 165g of CO2/km will get the first year's car tax for free.

This group includes most small- and mid-sized cars, and also what many would consider some quite serious cars. The BMW 3 series 2.0 litre diesel car, emits just 128g/km, and after the first year the road-tax bill will be just £35 a year.

Compare that to the same model, a 3-series with a sporty 3.5 litre petrol engine, and the bills are quite different. In the first year the buyer will pay £550, and £310 a year from then.

These anomalies will apply across all the manufacturers' ranges of cars. In short, the new regime favours those who are happy to downsize or switch to diesel.

Take the Toyota Avensis estate. By 2010 a petrol 1.8 will cost £210 a year to tax, while the slightly larger diesel (2.0 litre) will cost £125 a year because it emits less C02. In comparison, the tiny Citroen C1 and the like will cost just £20 to tax, from March 2009 onwards

If you are buying a used car now, you need to look closely at what you'll be paying to tax your chosen model in the future.

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Who are you calling an old boiler?

Old heating systems are also extremely inefficient; they waste millions of pounds each year through heat escaping via the flue and from over-heating because of outdated or absent thermostats. Research by the Energy Savings Trust (EST) reveals that one third of British households heat their homes to 22-23C (72-73F). That's hotter than a sunny day on the Med. One in 10 homes (2.5million) is heated to 25C - the same temperature as an average day in the Canary Islands.

This underlines a trend in over-heating homes, with an average rise of one degree every decade in the temperature of the nation's living rooms, from 16C in the 1960s to 20.5C today.
he EST calculates that by switching to modern condensing boiler systems with proper thermostats set at 21C, we could prevent the release of 2.8million tonnes of CO\u2082 per year and the average household could save between £110 and £190 on its annual heating bills.

A condensing boiler works by capturing waste heat that normally escapes into the atmosphere via the flue. Condensing boilers cost between £800 and £1,500. That is £150-£200 more than a conventional boiler of equivalent make and output, so a condensing boiler will pay for itself within a year or so.
by Sarah Lonsdale

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