This is a huge project at its very beginning. There will be a lot of works to be done, a lot of money to be made, and a lot of fun to be had. Here I only list some immediate ideas of what can be done; further suggestions are welcome.
We welcome all kinds of cooperations with people sharing the works and sharing the gains.
If you think you can do it, build your own collectors, put them out, use the energy collected and let your neighbors see. This will give you big fun and save you money from your energy bills.
Do you know that many of today's big names in the IT industry have started in people's garage?
Send me pictures of your realisations. I can list them in this page.
Make money fast with solar energy:
In many developed countries, there are government incentives forcing electricity companies to buy back solar electricity at artificially inflated prices. In order to allow a photovoltaic installation to get back the initial investment, the buy back prices go to as high as 0.3-0.5€/kWh, with contracts covering as long as 20 years.
Make your own calculations. Now you can install a field of concentrating photovoltaic collectors, and get back the initial investment in less than 2 years, or even less than 1 year with such buy back prices. If you sign a contract for 20 years, you will be receiving free money during all the rest.
If you are interested, you should act quickly. Once the governments understand that something unexpected has happened, such incentives will stop immediately.
But don't think that doing so is unethical. You would be raising the government (and public) awareness of the new technology, thus contributing to its development and to the reduction of CO2 emissions. So you'll merit the gain.
If you have things to sell related to this project, please let me know. I may put your coordinates into the suppliers list.
We are looking for people to integrate the new technology into commercial products. As Shen Xi has no immediate plan to develop consumer products, it is ready to supply the intermediate product (collector and thermal storage tank) to system integrators or licence the patents. This is a great opportunity because vendors of the final product usually get the most of the profit.
And this affair will be particularly easy, as the cost analysis shows that the equipment cost is simply too low.
There is practically no technical difficulty in this part of the work. In the simplest case, you put together some collectors and a water tank, and you have a consumer product for water heating or space heating. The only possible difficulty lies in the design of the controlling unit, for which I can help personally.
Another important business opportunity is to produce various parts and equipments needed in the solar system. One example is the receiver tube covered by photovoltaic cells. Home turbines, absorption coolers and home ustensiles working on a high temperature heat source are other examples. See this list.
If you already have a solar energy business, whether in flat panel, evacuated tubes or photovoltaics, you may be interested in switching to this collector. This is often very easy to do, and can bring important gain in performance/cost ratio to your products.
If you are an inventor, try to improve my design. If your idea really helps, you can patent it and get rich. My initial design certainly has big room for improvements.
Please spread the news around. By doing so, you will let more people notice this, hence more people to join, and more products to come out. This will hopefully help stopping global warming faster.
If you have a web site or a personal web page, add a link to this site. That will also help greatly.
Visit the discussion forum.
If you are a teacher, think of giving solar projects to your students. The do-it-yourself design is very suitable for such purposes.
Such a project is very good for learning, because a lot of topics can be touched: energy, optics, heat transfer, electronics, mechanics, material sciences, vacuum technology, etc.
If you want to have fun, try to break the record of concentration ratio. Classical designs top at 82 times with the huge power plant troughs in the deserts, I have got 85 times with the first home made collector, but this is certainly improvable, and the theoretical limit is about 220 times. 220 cannot be reached in the practice, but things like 140 or so is not impossible.
Of course, clear rules must be established at first for the competition.
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