Making Sheet Rock Without Fossil Fuels
November 25th, 2010 by Susan Kraemer
As California moves to implement AB32, its climate bill, one business model that looks very likely to succeed is the use of solar power to make heat for industries that need it. Solar power can replace fossil fuels used to make heat in these cases.
Gypsum production (for drywall or sheet rock manufacture) is one such industry. Now dependent on fossil fuels to make heat, the industry needs heat for many drywall processes including drying, calcining plaster pre-chilling, and combined heat and power generation. But fossil fuels need to be phased out to meet AB32 requirements for low carbon emissions, because greenhouse gases cause damaging and expensive climate change.
For industries such as these, the Bay Area’s Glasspoint has developed a solar CSP solution for industrial heat production. It uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight to create heat. A one-acre GlassPoint solar array can generate 10,000 MMBtus of heat, the company says, for less than the cost of heat produced by burning fossil fuels. Read more…
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About the Author
Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.
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