Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Day 118: Windorah Solar Farm.

In the outback you come across some amazing, weird sites that just don’t happen in our everyday lives if we live in a city.  Take for instance the Windorah Solar Farm, we were driving along from Jundah on our way to Strzelecki trek and even though it was cloudy today, around the corner, greeted by five solar dishes.  Had to take a restock on which way we had come thinking we may be in Parkes, but nobody was playing cricket in these dishes so we knew we were on the right track.  Standing just a bit taller than me, each dish is 14.5m high by 13.7m wide containing 112 curved mirrors measuring.   Just so they don’t cast a shadow on their fellow dish they are aligned in a north to south manner, face the east ready to catch the morning’s rays and then follow the sun like a sunflower during the day.  When the sun goes down they flip round to the east ready to start a new day of tracking the rays.    This is an alternative to using diesel generators for towns past the electricity grid, and cutting down on 100,000 litres of diesel per year, not a bad saving.

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