Comment on How solar panels generate electricity

Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

There is actually a Solar Power Generation system were a solar collector uses sunlight to melt salt which then circulates through pipes to a place were it heats up water to boiling and that steam then goes through a turbine thus generating electricity.

However to reach those temperatures a simple panel isn’t enough so what you have is a ton of mirrors over a large area all pointing to a central tower were the salt-melting happens.

Here is an example.

By the way, this stuff actually has benefits over solar such as the ability to generate power at night (basically you don’t extract all the heat of the molten salt during the day and just keep using it to boil water to feed the steam turbine during the night), plus it’s still a bit more efficient than solar panels and like solar panels it’s also improving throught things like using different salts.

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