What if we based dozens of solar towers at sea (floating/inflatable structures)?

I would think the collector area would gather moist air and send it up the chimney, one could perhaps mount huge inflatable condensation plates on top to capture fresh water, water that would not only quench the thurst of inhabitants of arid areas near a salt sea, but also would generate some extra electricty driving a turbine when it rains down in a special drainage pipe attached to the solar tower.

Applied in huge farms , using dozens of scaled up solar towers (more like 5 km height than the "puny" 1 km as is currently in the baking ) one could -perhaps- pre-emptively extract several hundreds of Gigawatts and leave a potential new hurricane in the making without the bootstrapping energy to developen??
-- jvanguts, Dec 18 2005

You really like these things, don't you?

Suggest a different category.
-- moomintroll, Dec 18 2005


//1 km, currently in the baking//?

Hell of a structure. I'll try to find a link, but something on a much smaller scale has been done. Crap. I can't remember how to find what I've read before, but I think it was done in the 20's by a Frenchman.

Muy Interesante.
-- Zimmy, Dec 19 2005


Two problems that I can see (sorry)

- keeping such a large structure upright without bedrock to anchor the foundations (perhaps balloon-supported, as has been suggested elsewhere here). /edit/ er, by you...

- the tower as proposed by Enviromission for the Australian desert use a huge greenhouse skirt to trap heat in the underlying soil for continuous (ie night-time) operation. I don't think seawater will do this nearly as well, as has a much higher ability to soak up heat, and it moves.
-- BunsenHoneydew, Jan 07 2006


Haven't we done this before?
-- wagster, Jan 07 2006


It could work!

Long tower 3/4 underwater.

Spindle windmill on top drives plumbing and pumps.

Warm water created by solar collector interacts with cold water from depth (like those generation units in Hawaii) to create differential electrical current and condensation from atmosphere.

Deep sea water is sprayed into the solar cooker such that minerals fall out and fresh water collected, piped out with condensate (using my amazing pipeline made of ValveTube™ technology [ long rubbery pipe with arterial valves gets agitated with natural wave motion, fluid goes one-way ]
-- subflower, Jan 08 2006



random, halfbakery