the sun heats the covering down the bottom, the air in it gets hot and rises outo the funnel (after rushing to it) because hot air rises. since the edges of the covering on the bottom are open to the air, it constantly pulls in new air and it jsut keeps going. oh, the air pushes turbines in the tower to make the eleectricity.
it never stops since it also has water thingys under the covering that store heat, so it heats the air during the night as well, keeping it going.
it uses no coal, no gas, it burns nothing.
it just sits there and makes power.
this is a picture of the first one made, in Spain. it's 200meters high, the covering on the bottom is about 240meters in diameter.
it's still there, but for some reason they don't use it anymore. i have been having trouble finding out why. they only used it for teh planned 5-7 years or so, just to prove it worked. and it did work perfectly. it generated 50MegaWatts, enough to power 50,000 homes.
http://www.sbp.de/en/html/projects/detail.html?id=82
i SOOO want to visit this thing.
they are now building on in Australia as well, a bigger one. it will be ONE Kilometer tall, making it the tallest structure ever or something, but i'm more interested in it coz it's completely renewable energy and it's so simple.
some links for this are here.
http://www.enviromission.com.au/ this official site for the 1KM high australian tower also has a downloadable video from beyond 2000 covering the first 200meter tower in Spain. it's very interesting.
http://www.wentworth.nsw.gov.au/solartower/ the tower is being built in this shire, they have a page dedicated to it, it's where i got the $700million price from.
looking at this thing, it looks like the "tower of terror" / "giant drop" double ride at Dreamworld amusement park.
amusement parks use a lot of power, this one uses 2.2MW, and the tower of terror itself is very hungry for power, it uses the same amount again (so the power usable for the amusement park doubles for 6 seconds everytime it runs).
the vertical section of the "tower of terror", it has quite a runup first (not pictured) before it goes vertical. but my god, does it ever take off from stationary fast, quite frightening!
wouldn't it be a great idea to build an amusement park around the energy tower? the amusement park would only use a fraction of the power. a ride could go all teh way up the side of the tower, like the "tower of terror" ride but way bigger.
another idea i had, was to make a more insane version of the tower of terror, and use it for assisted launching of things into space. the tower of terror uses Electromagnets to accelerate andn deaccelerate a carriage full of people forward and then up a tower (for a total of 300meters), it's basically a huge railgun, tamed to only 1.5G so that it's safe enough to be an amusement.
but if you went the whole hog, and made a railgun launcher that went all the way up the 1KM high energy tower, you'd be able to reach a VERY fast speed by the time you get to the top, then you'd just shoot off the end of it, and perhaps fire your scramjets to reach space.
of course you wouldn't need it to pull only a puny 1.5G
. this isn't an amusement ride afterall. with 200MW of power at your disposal, i doubt there would be any limit to how fast you could go on it.ssooooooooo
what'dya think.
The Space Shuttle performs maneuvers like the positive roll, etc. while it's engines are on. If you were to launch from a tower, you wouldn't be able to perform these maneuvers until you reached escape velocity and left the top of the tower. Problem? I don't know.
