June 14, 2003
City firm flaunts solar innovation
Saskatoon StarPhoenix
Murray Lyons - SP Business Editor
A Saskatoon company developing technologies to make hydrogen affordable
is showing off a key component of its plan.
A low-cost solar concentrator that focuses sunlight to boil water within
seconds will be demonstrated today by officials of Solar Hydrogen
Energy Corp. (SHEC) at the Mall at Lawson Heights parking lot.
The demonstration scale model captures about 1,200 watts of
sunlight.
Company president Tom Beck says this technology, at industrial scale,
could be the ideal renewable energy source for areas with lots of
sunshine, like Mexico, Arizona, and Australia.
Friday afternoon, Beck and his technical staff were boiling water and
driving a tiny-scale steam engine, using the solar concentrator setup
it had mounted on a utility trailer in front of SHEC offices on
Hanselman Ave.
To Prove the power of sunlight, concentrated by curved mirrors to a
focal point, staff showed it takes just seconds to burn through a steel
packing band.
The power of concentrated sunlight has been known for more than 2,000
years, based on Greek mathematician Archimedes reportedly setting an
enemy Roman fleet on fire by using sunlight with mirrors.
In more modern times, capturing electricity from the sun has been done
through photo-voltaic silicon panels. But science has had a difficult
time building a silicon wafer that will produce electricity for a
competitive cost.
Beck says concentrating sunlight to make electricity through boiling
water and using a mechanical turbine is a far more promising method
of producing electricity.
"Concentration technology has been in existence since the 1800s," Beck
said. "The primary cost is the cost of the concentrator. We can bring
down the cost of the concentrator to less than a third of the cost
of anything being done in the United States and Germany today."
Beck says a breakthrough in the cost of building a solar concentrator
could make hydrogen, as a fuel, affordable now. He said there wouldn't
be a need to wait for hydrogen fuel cells to become common in vehicles,
as hydrogen is needed right now in industrial processes.
Solar-produced hydrogen could be a replacement for hydrogen stripped
from natural gas that is used in making fertilizer or in petroleum
refining processes, Beck said. "To compete with relatively cheap fossil
fuels has not been practical in the past," he said.
What SHEC has done is make a concentrator that is simple to make using
relatively common materials. "We developed a process to get the
curvatures required to a high degree of accuracy with a manufacturing
process that is very, very cheap," Beck said.
Beck says SHEC is estimating a utility could produce daytime electrical
power using solar using solar concentrators and conventional steam
generators for about $1 a watt capital cost. The big advantage of solar
is that once the capital cost is covered, there is no fuel cost.
SHEC's public demonstration this week puts the focus on its solar
concentrator. But the other technology SHEC wants recognition from
investors and government funding agencies is for its method of using
sunlight to drive hydrogen out of water.
Beck says the company has independent verification from researchers that
SHEC's lab-bench method of driving hydrogen from super heated steam at
temperatures of around 750 Celsius can be duplicated at a larger
scale.
Marrying the solar concentrator, to create steam, with SHEC's
thermal-mechanical method of separating hydrogen from water molecules
has not been done yet, Beck admitted.
SHEC has been trying to raise capital in Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C.,
even through the unconventional method of buying television ads to
encourage people to invest. While only a small amount of money has been
raised in Saskatchewan, Beck says there is great interest in Alberta
and B.C., even among those in the petroleum industry.
Beck says the hope is for Ottawa to put money behind SHEC's technologies
as part of the country's green plan.
