[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Not to distract the Vort membership from the recent fascinating Lithium-Ion "breakthrough" I thought it might be interesting to recap another interesting claim. As you may recall, a couple of weeks ago Terry Blanton brought to our attention the fascinating DOE Sterling solar-dish project.
See: http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=53700939
Time to expose my ignorance a bit.
Does anyone here know how they generate "grid-ready" AC from these engines? "Grid-ready" implies exactly 60 Hz, in phase with the grid, right? And that implies that the alternators must be mechanically linked in some way. Absent such a linkage, the problem of matching phase and frequency would seem to be just as bad for the Stirling farm as the problem of inverting the DC from a solar panel farm is.
What kind of linkage would be used to keep a 100 square mile block of Stirling motors phase-locked?
(For that matter, why don't we just switch to 300 Hz electricity everywhere? It would cut our conversion losses dramatically, bringing us much closer to energy independence, and would be far safer than 60 Hz power to boot -- 60 Hz is an almost ideal frequency for scrambling the PLL which controls your heart muscle. Seems just as practical as lots of other schemes we've heard tell of, and it doesn't use any untried technology, nor does it assume the results of some future bit of research will pay off in an appropriate way. All it requires is the will to do it.)
