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Energy from 1000 Suns

By Allan Chochinov - March 20, 2006

in Tech

One would think that concentrating this much energy on a spot made out of any material would simply burn it up, but Israelâ€™s National Solar Energy Center will start testing a 400 square meter solar collecting dish. From The Energy Blog:

The dish is lined with 216 mirrors, but not more than a quarter will be uncovered to sunlight for the initial experiments. The mirrors concentrate the light onto a small square of concentrator photovoltaic cells, which convert the light into electricity. The concentrator photovoltaic panel is only 10 cm by 10 cm and is too small to absorb the energy from the whole dish. An array of cells large enough to absorb all of the collectors energy would be about 65 cm x 65 cm. The testing will progress in stages, first at 20 suns, then with 40 suns and so on up to 100 suns. [Treehuger]

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18 years ago

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why don't they make those mirrors solar panels? then they can collect BOTH the diluted and less diluted form! i'm sure there's a limit to the amount of sunlight a single concentrator can take, when that limit is reached, maybe the reflectiveness of the mirrors can be 0.5-0.7x instead of 1x and then you can switch them with solar panels :) Same size, maybe 1.5X energy output?
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Energy from 1000 Suns

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