Talk:Solar tower
From Academic Kids
I admit my article Solar power tower was ameturish compared to the many excellent articles in Wikipedia, however this is the common name well established by the Sandia Corp tower near Barstow, California, which is not descibed at all under the heading of Solar tower. The link supplied under solar tower did not finish loading sufficiently to obtain useful information in 30 minutes, which may be the fault of my computer, but more likely means the project is out of money and won't be built in this decade, perhaps never. IMHO, the mirrors are signifcantly more cost effective and the mirror pilot plant is still producing 100 times more power than the Solar tower in Spain which was wrecked long ago in a storm.
The solar collectors for both types of tower are valnerable to storm dammage and reducing valnerability will be costly in both cases. IMHO the Austrailia power tower solar collector (a square mile plus of green house) should be built on a steep hillside (steeply sloped land is less costly and the sun angle will be more favorable) which faces between North and Northwest. The mile tall chimney likely needs to be at the top of the hill to get a proper foundation for it's great weight. It will be more difficult to find multiple suitable locations for power towers than for Solar power towers. I think both will run into diminishing returns on investment before they can be scalled to ten gigawatt hours per year put on the grid, so hundreds of each are needed to help Earth's energy problems significately. Neil
Disam
None of the entries in the article are long or detailed enough to be deemed an article. Since it is used in so many different ways, shouldn't it be a disambiguation page instead? — Frecklefoot | Talk 19:56, Mar 2, 2005 (UTC)
