Solar Photothermal Power Generation

Abstract

Solar energy could be a major resource for the semiarid regions of the United States and the world. This source of energy is a popular topic in the media at this time, but is it really the option which many would like to see or is it more likely to remain the illusion it has been up to now? Many ways of using solar energy have been proposed, and each appears to have a good technological basis. The additional factors that will see many solar schemes fall by the wayside are the hard facts of economics and the realities of social assimilation of technological advances.The major options of house-heating and cooling and electrical power production need to be examined. Home uses depend upon the degree to which people are willing to put up with the inconveniences associated with bulky roof-top units. It is more likely that solar energy will subsequently find wider acceptance when it can be converted into power and transportable fuels at remote solar power-farms located in the arid regions of the United States and other lands that are fortunate enough to have these sunny regions. The savings to the environment could be very considerable.

Surface plasmons in metallic nanoparticles: fundamentals and applications

“…In this search, the sun appears as a clean source of energy with lifetime over 5000 million years releasing daily 4000 times the earth electric energy consumption. The use of solar energy can be addressed by different techniques including photovoltaic [104,105,106,107], photochemical [108,109,110] or photothermal [111,112,113] Increases of photovoltaic cells efficiency of the order of 10-15% have been achieved by incorporating Au and Ag NPs on the cell surface [119,120,121,122,123]. The efficiency in this kind of devices has a complex dependence on the NPs size, shape and spatial distribution, since interacting effects play a different role on the light scattering and absorption processes [116].…”

Surface plasmons in metallic nanoparticles: fundamentals and applications

“…In this search, the sun appears as a clean source of energy with lifetime over 5000 million years releasing daily 4000 times the earth electric energy consumption. The use of solar energy can be addressed by different techniques including photovoltaic [104,105,106,107], photochemical [108,109,110] or photothermal [111,112,113] ones. The main limitation of these technologies relays on the efficiency of the light absorption and conversion processes that make them hardly viable from an economical point of view.…”

Conservation and Development

“…It would therefore be only prudent, as well as a means of conserving fossil fuels, to use wherever possible methods that do not depend on imported sources of energy-and use whatever means are available to harness renewable sources of energy. These include solar energy (Bockris, 1974;Neilsen, 1975;Meinel & Meinel, in press), nuclear fusion (Hirsch & Rice, 1974), wind (Bockris, 1975), and various possibilities in the Earth and seas.…”