Foiled Solar Power Contest Has Silver Lining : Science: Clouds force cancellation of competition, but college students still receive a lesson in alternative energy.
It was to be the ultimate school science fair project on solar energy: college engineering students from as far as Upstate New York competed here Saturday--the sunshine capital of California--to show how to best capture the sun’s rays to create electricity.
But for all the technology they could muster--for nine months of research and design work, for all their arrays of mirrors, their computer programs and high-tech applications to transfer the sun’s heat to water to drive steam turbines, they encountered their most troublesome nemesis.
Clouds.
And so the event, called the Solar Two Challenge, went the way of baseball: a foreshortened season and no world series.
Because the sun was obscured by the incoming storm front even in the Mojave Desert--halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas--the final leg of the competition could not be completed. So the students’ solar energy models were not actually tested.
Still, organizers of the intercollegiate competition called the event a success. Lured by tens of thousands of dollars in prize money, scores of college students became smitten by solar energy technology.
“There may not have been any technological breakthroughs here, but engineers can learn something from these students,” said Patrick Summers, spokesman for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.
Solar energy has not been adopted commercially because it costs less to use coal and gas to fuel electrical plants.
But with increasing environmental concerns about the use of those fuels, and with the prospect that the price of coal and oil may someday skyrocket, the federal government is pushing for an expansion of solar energy technology. Thus, the U.S. Department of Energy and a consortium of utilities, including Southern California Edison, co-sponsored the event to encourage college students to pursue advances in solar energy.
“If we don’t keep working on developing the technology,” Summers said, “we won’t have it when we need it.”
Awards were nonetheless distributed Saturday for the students’ works, based on their designs. Engineering students from UC Riverside’s Center for Environmental Research and Technology won first place and $14,375. The team from the University of Kansas placed second and won $8,750, and engineering students from Cal State Chico placed third and received $6,875.
UC Riverside’s success was based on the simplicity of its design and maximizing the amount of reflective mirror surface within the allowable work space, said judge Hugh Reilly of the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., the government’s think tank for solar energy.
The Riverside model featured six panels of adjustable mirrors that looked something like oversize Venetian blinds, calibrated to the smallest of measurements to focus the sun’s rays on a target point to heat water. In a large-scale application, the water--or other liquids--could be heated enough to power steam turbine engines to create electricity.
Bruce Leung, 20, the team leader, also boasted that the model--unlike some of the more fragile-looking displays--could best resist wind and earthquakes--even if it could not overcome clouds.
“But in real-world application, we would have heat storage systems to allow for continued operation even with cloud cover,” he said.
Cal State Chico students said what they learned from the competition transcended solar technology and could be applied to any real-world engineering project.
“We learned what it’s like to try to build a model when you’re still waiting for your parts to be delivered, the importance of interfacing between the designers and the production side, and how communications breakdowns can be a problem,” Chico student John Sicoli said.
Appropriately, Chico won the teamwork competition.
Invitations to participate in the Solar Two Challenge went out last year, and 65 universities sought applications. By the time the competition entered its final stage Friday, five schools were still in the running. For making it that far, the two schools that finished out of the top three--Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, N.Y., and Geneva College of Beaver Falls, Pa., each were awarded $5,000.
The competition was staged in the shadow of Solar Two, a full-size demonstration project by the Department of Energy and the utilities.
Beginning in 1996, it is to determine whether solar energy can best be tapped by using fields of huge mirrors to reflect the sun’s heat back onto an elevated target, where molten salt can be superheated to 1,000 degrees. The heat of the liquid salt would be transferred to water, turning it into steam to drive turbines.
The two-day competition was also intended to interest younger students in solar energy and featured races of solar-powered model cars. Among the prizes were hats with solar-powered fans.
Therein came the only mishap of the affair: a young girl’s hair was pulled into the small fan’s blades as they whirred under the sun.
“Solar works,” one official wisecracked.
