Well, it only took 8 days and the help of my brother to find what I was looking for in thermal solar energy (Can We Harness More Solar Energy From The Sun – Heat?). An Australian based company named EnviroMission has plans to build a Solar Tower to leverage thermal energy from the sun on a large scale. The first installment of the project will provide power to an estimated 200,000 homes by delivering 200 megawatts of electricity.

So what is the project and how does it work? The video below illustrates it best.

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Basically, a massive tower is built in the middle of an array of “solar collectors” which is one giant greenhouse that heats the air which is then sucked up through the tower. As the hot air rises up through the tower and out of the greenhouse, it passes through several turbines that rotate to generate electricity. A nice animation can be found here on the EnviroMission website.

To get some scope of just how large this tower could be, comparisons are being made to the Sears Tower in Chicago which rises 1,705 feet above the ground (including its antennas). According to CNN Money, “A half-mile-tall version is in the works for China…”. That’s roughly 2,600 feet tall, almost twice the height of the Sears Tower. It’s easy to see how massive amounts of electricity could be generated with such a large volume of air passing through turbines at the base of one of these towers. The thermal tower will still be able to operate at night because heat will be stored during the day and then released during periods of darkness.

The most evident advantage to this type of power supply is the infinite energy available from the sun. This electricity will be sustainable and almost unlimited. The only limit we can see is available ground space to build these massive structures, and of course, several days of cloud cover.