The technology of hundreds of thousands of flat mirrors pointed across hundreds of acres at a water boiler hundreds of feet in the air cycling at thousands of lbs pressure is obsolete. The MIT PhDs need to go work in a power plant and not just do an energy balance. It is capital intensive, maintenance intensive and will be a great prop for the next "Sahara" movie sequel.
FYI, I started my career for a controls/software Company named "measurex" (now part of Honeywell) located on Bubb road in Cupertino, CA down the street from Apple. I programmed and installed control systems. We were always calling the software/hardware competitors system they had just sold "vaporware" because they sold something they had never done before. Some software is buggy and crappy So don't give me your bleeding heart programmers don't make fun of other programmer's software, I respect good technology, good software, good engineering and facts. Adding $1.6B to the national debt for a movie prop seems stupid to me. I will hold off on the greenie weenie comments if it hurts your feelings, I am a bit of one myself On Tuesday, February 25, 2014, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > ChemE Stewart > <[email protected]<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[email protected]');> > > wrote: > > My tax money helped pay for it, I can call it what I want. I have >> designed a solar thermal plant. > > > Since you designed one, you damn well should see these are not Home Depot > consumer-grade mirrors, and you should have more respect for your > colleagues who designed this facility. The people who wrote this document > are good at what they do, even if what they are doing turns out to be > technological dead end: > > http://www.google.org/pdfs/google_heliostat_reflector_design.pdf > > > >> How any have you designed Jed? > > > I have designed a lot of software. Enough that I would never go to a forum > like this and claim that Microsoft Word is garbage written by monkeys > banging on typewriters. I think Word is obsolete in many ways. It has an > advanced case of feature-itis. The graphics integration is dreadful. But > any product has problems. I respect the professional capabilities of the > people who wrote it. > > - Jed > >
