This week we visited the Tanquinho Solar Power Plant near the city of Campinas, a little info about the site can be found here. Tanquinho is an experimental power plant employing two types of solar panels and two types of mounting systems, along with a series of windmills yet to be constructed. The two types of panels used there are amorphous crystalline silicon and poly crystalline silicon, the latter being the more efficient and expensive.
Both types of panels are employed in two ways: stationary mounted and tracking. The poly crystalline tracking method is obviously the most efficient way to harness the power of the sun due to the fact that the panel is constantly in direct sunlight, not oblique light as in the stationary panels.
Above you can see the sole motor that controls the tracking panel. Every five minutes the panels are tuned by a few degrees to line them up with the suns rays. At night and in high winds the panels go to their rest state, level to the ground, to save energy and reduce strain. Brazil is closer to the equator than the US so it receives more direct sunlight each year, making it a much better candidate for solar generation. However, much of Brazil is rainforest which contributes to a high moisture content in the air, creating clouds. The South West US is actually ideal for solar since it has very low moisture content, thus less clouds. Right now all of these panels at the Tanquinho site were constructed in China, where silicon is abundant and the solar panel manufacturing industry is booming. If you are looking to start a solar panel manufactury Brazil is a great place to do so. One criticism for our current energy production in the US is that we depend on foreign resources, the same would be true if we adopted solar since almost all production is done in China.
Exciting Stuff!
Later that day we visited the Bosch Flex Fuel plant, located in Campinas as well. Bosch is a fairly well known company which has its hands in everything from industrial systems manufacturing, jet engines and refrigerators. Sadly, they didn't allow any photography inside the plant so this will have to suffice:
You can find more information about their systems here. The idea around flex fuels in that gasoline doesn't have to be the only thing you run your car on. Actually, the first motorcar, the Ford Model T, was designed to run on ethanol instead of gasoline. But due to some slight differences between the two fuels, and the prohibition of ethanol in the US, almost all cars after this point ran solely on gasoline.
Ethanol may be cleaner burning than gasoline but it also has less 'umph', or energy per unit volume. So back in the day, when you wanted to fill your tank up with ethanol instead of gasoline, you would have to manually tune your carburetor to inject more or less fuel and oxygen depending on your mixture. One of the Bosch innovations was a series of sensors and programs which can detect your fuel mixture and tweak your engine automatically, called Lambda correction. Another problem with ethanol is that it doesn't burn very well in the cold. Flex fuel vehicles of the past would have two tanks, a large tank for ethanol and a smaller, sub tank for gasoline which was used to start the car and get it warm. Bosch as also fixed this problem by designing a special fuel injector that can heat pure ethanol to a functional temperature in around 8-10 seconds.
Ethanol may be the future of our internal combustion vehicles due to the fact that it is CO2 neutral, meaning that the only CO2 it produces is the same CO2 absorbed by the plants which produced it, therefore not contributing to greenhouse gas levels.
The next day we went to an alternative energy conference in Sao Paolo. There was a multitude of companies represented there, however the vast majority were focused on solar; manufacturing, mounting and systems management. Biomass and wind were also represented and we got a chance to talk to employees and pick up info sheets, not to mention general conference swag.
Here's my group members getting excited about the products! I'm not sure why solar was represented much more than any of the other technologies but it might be because Brazil is such a good candidate for it, however wind and biomass are also very good options here. It was tough trying to get info from the representatives since maybe 1 in 10 spoke English, but generally there was more than one company that did the same thing so it wasn't too hard to get the jist.
Today we visited the Henry Borden Hydroelectric Power Plant, just over the mountains in Cubatao. It was a little hectic getting there since we had to go over the mountains alongside many tractor trailers squeezed onto very thin roads. The views were amazing though:
The plant draws its power from a multitude of rivers high up in the mountains and controls their drop through a series of large diameter pipes which ultimately spin a series of large turbines. Using a property called electromagnetic induction, electricity is generated and sent to the people of Sao Paolo.
Those mountains way up in the distance? Yeah, that's where the water starts. Eventually it reaches one of two main power houses and is sent through these specially designed nozzles, constructed in 1926 and still in use today.
The water streams are concentrated so much that each jet delivers about 70 tons of force. That force is applied directly to these wheels, also specially designed for this system.
These wheels are connected by an axle to a series of magnetic fields, housing and transformers which ultimately turn the raw water power to electrical power. Each power house holds about eight of these modules.
In 1932 a group of revolutionaries attempted to bomb the hydroelectric plant in order to cut power to all of Sao Paolo. Although they were unsuccessful, the company decided to build its second power house inside the mountain. The project wasn't completed until the 1950's, long after revolutionaries were a problem, but the energy deficiency of the time and labor incentives made the project happen anyway and it is still in use today.
The US already employs a significant amount of hydroelectric power at sites like the Hoover Dam and Niagara Falls. Seeing these renewable energy sources utilized in Brazil makes me hopeful that the US can cut its dependence on foreign oil and create a green energy industry. Maybe with the knowledge I've learned at these sites and the falling costs of new technologies I can help our country reach that goal, providing cleaner and more secure energy for the future.
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