CSPToday Conference In Sevilla

[Climatebabes]

An Industry Conference

CSP Today should be of great interest to many people, especially in the high solar resource countries. It seems to have become the meeting point for the bigger energy companies that see great benefit in building expensive solar plants for centralized energy production. But how about the smaller parties. NGOs building clean power for villages that otherwise would burn their surrounding woods? Or simply less than 1 million dollar projects?

I wuld like to see whether that is already on offer, but the fee for this conference is about 1000,- Euro even for academic guests (incl. VAT). Commercial guests pay almost 2000,- Euro. That will not be to cost effective for me I'm affraid.

Small Scale Parabolic Trough Projects
If you do a web search for a parabolic trough collector you come across very little material. Yet it is the most tried and tested solar concetrator around. Gang Xiao wrote a papaer about an optimized closed collector design but this is not a business. There are open designs also waiting in the wings, much cheaper than the exisiting plants, but how to benefit from that? In our strange world the simplest contraptions remain hard to build because they are simpley kept out of reach. Think about small stirling generators, thermo acoustic generators, tesla turbines etc. I would personally like to change that asap.

Parabolictrough.org
Therefore I started a new website, called Parabolictrough.org. It will be a place where you can buy and offer pabolic trough systems and parts, and find information about organizations and designs. The Parabolic trough collector is one of the most well tested designs in existence.You should be able to buy them off the shelf.

Your input and support
Like with the Solar Bowl I would like your input and support. Building CSP has contacts with mirror and other parts manufacturers. www. parabolictrough.org should become a center of DIY and small scale (and perhaps also large scal) CSP activity.