Courtesy of EnviroMission

One thing Arizona has in abundance is heat. Lots and lots of heat. There’s a proposal afoot for for a new clean energy project in the desert that harvests hot air to create power. I’ll attempt to refrain from any politician jokes.

The idea is to build a solar updraft tower 2,600 feet tall to capture the hot air as it rises. This would make it the world’s second tallest structure. As we all learned in elementary school, hot air goes up and this would generate 200 MW of electricity daily and last for 80 years. That’s enough energy to power 100,000 homes. For 80 years.

The taller the tower, the stronger the air flow which turns the turbines and creates more energy. The structure would be made of concrete. “Because air is free, operating costs will be minimal,” according to EnviroMission, the company proposing this project.

We certainly have plenty of hot air around here, and not just from the state legislature.

CNN has the story here, complete with a video that demonstrates how the project works.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 8th, 2011 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Clean Energy, Solar. Tags for this post: clean energy, EnviroMission, solar energy, solar updraft tower. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.