A new piece of solar technology from IBM not only provides electricity it can desalinate water for sanitation and drinking
Computer giant IBM last week revealed the prototype of its advanced solar electricity generators: a 30ft-high concrete sunflower fitted with wafer-thin aluminium mirrors and a maze of tiny tubes for carrying coolant through the heart of each device. The machines, which will be built in conjunction with the Swiss company Airlight Energy, can convert 80% of the suns radiation into electricity and hot water, it is claimed, with each generating 12 kilowatts of electricity and 20kW of heat on a sunny day, enough to supply several homes.
At the devices official unveiling in Zurich, executives for both companies said they hoped that by 2017, when their sunflower generators should be ready for the market, they could be manufactured for half to one-third of the cost of comparable solar converters today. According to IBM, the machines secret lies with the microscopic tubes that carry water through the cluster of photovoltaic chips at the heart of each device. This system has already been adopted by IBM to cool its high-performance supercomputers. We were inspired by the branched blood supply of the human body, said Bruno Michel, from the IBM Research laboratories in Zurich.