Solar Power Helps Pump Oil

      Built by GlassPoint Solar, a Fremont company that uses renewable power to squeeze oil from the ground, a new solar steam plant has been developed in the Middle East, specifically the Omani desert. GlassPoint Solar, raising approximately $32 million in venue capital, has a small pilot plant in Kern County that has been generating steam for two years. Known as the Oman plant, it is 27 times bigger than the relatively small pilot plant, producing a average of 50 tons of steam per day.
       "Oman doesn't have the massive oil reserves of some of its neighbors, and its production started declining more than 10 years ago," said John O'Donnell, GlassPoint's Vice President of Business Development. "Steam-flooding an old field can help boost production. Plus, Oman has heavy oil deposits that are hard to develop without steam." O'Donnell added, "most steam-flooding operations burn natural gas to generate the steam, but Oman doesn't have large gas reserves of its own. And the price of importing it is high, more than three times its current cost in the United States."
         GlassPoint's technology is a low-cost twist on the conventional display of solar power plants in the past. GlassPoint's mirrors are made from thin, lightweight and inexpensive aluminium sheets. A decent breeze could knock the mirrors out of alignment so GlassPoint has them inside of glass greenhouses. Most of the materials can be bought from shelves from many suppliers. "Solar will be, by far, the cheapest way of complying with the standard," O'Donnell said. "As that develops, obviously we'll be keenly interested. We're a California company."

GlassPoint Solar

The World's First Solar-Powered Helicopter Takes Flight

      As projects like the Solar Impulse and NASA's Helios wing has been recently developed, the idea of propelling aircraft using solar power isn't as fanciful or impossible to accomplish as it seemed before, even if they are still in experimental stages. Before long, we'll surely be able to see solar power used to aid traditional airplanes, even if it is not accompanied by main fuel.
     To show what is possible, a team of master students from the United Kingdom have built what they believe to be called the world's first "solar-copter," a quadrotor that flies solely on solar power. At the moment, it is capable only of short flights but the team had claimed that it should fly longer soon, once they enabled it to have a storage system as well.

     "The Solar-copter is a quadrotor design that incorporates a solar panel providing the power for the propulsion system," the six students had commented. "It is controlled in the same way as a standard battery-powered quadrotor. Optimum thrust-to-weight ratio was mainly achieved through an efficient propulsion system, unique frame design and an optimized solar panel."

     Future versions may be useful in activities such as surveillance, search and rescue, and tracking animal migrations, perhaps in Africa, Australia, Middle East, and Southern Europe, where there is more sun than in England. Its technology could also help increase the range of conventional choppers, and perhaps give other solar aircraft, such as the Solar Impulse, better maneuverability and control.