Howdy y'all. I'm mostly a lurker, but I have some thoughts that may qualify as original and I want to see if I can clearly articulate them here, since this is such a relevant arena with such fertile possibilities of reasonable feedback.

We all know what the problem is here- too much carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and also too much of many other greenhouse gases, such as methane and so on. These gases have different effects, some of them increase thermal mass (so, statistically, an atmosphere with more of them retains heat for longer), some of them have the problem of re-bounding light scattering off the earth from the sun- so in effect, the 'greenhouse effect' is 'statistically more photons of light heating up the ground twice because it bounces off CO2 on the way back off earth, and bounces back down again'). Some of this is the effects of natural phenomena like volcanoes, the byproducts of floral and faunal respiration, gastronomy, and flatulence, and the other 99% is basically a combination of what's been burned as coal or various petrol-derivitive fuel oils, and also what has been burned as "sustainable fuels", which- rather than implying actual cleanliness- just means "we can keep making more of it to burn".

To recap, carbon dioxide and methane (and others) in our atmosphere are the problem, the effects are an accelerated climate that launches projectile storms further inland and raises the sea level. All a mess we can basically do without. So we need a way to get these out of the atmosphere, and a way to put less of them into the atmosphere.

Fortunately, all of the things we burn this stuff for to put it there is for either steam turbines or internal combustion engines. Both of these are relatively easy to put to this purpose- steam doesn't care if you put carbon dioxide in the air, for example, and isn't the least bit racist either.

So, I think there are several parts to a real solution here. The interesting part for you guys is: making a small, compact, water-boiler and steam turbine, capable of generating power by virtue of aiming itself at the sun to generate the steam to feed into a turbine capable of making that into electricity. As a secondary step- because, as we all know, there's no sunlight for this at night- my thought is to put this on top of a normal methane collector from a biogas digester system, and to use a small methane boiler as a secondary steam source for high-power-use at night, if you're throwing a party and have all the lights on and the sound system going or whatever it is. This is a reasonable amount of power for a generator to generate, I think it's just as reasonable for a comparably-sized steam turbine.

Since that can be a bit noisy, I've kind of been figuring that this should be an outdoor thing, but the more I think about it, the more it seems that an old house with a chimney could have that chimney effectively blocked off, and a suspended capsule with the turbine suspended in that, and then the steam in/condensed water out/power lines can be fed in from the top of that suspension so that any vibration is dampened and the noise that does come out is transmitted out top of the chimney, which, if that doesn't also cut down the sign, baffles can be put in to break up the airflow/cause turbulence, which will cut down on the noise transmission. It's also possible to tune the turbine to only spin in a certain range of RPM, and that frequency of rotation can be cancelled out by a bell that's tuned to that frequency and will basically absorb the whole shock wave, and then can just be muffled out- that's how some high-end car mufflers do this. Other options are almost certainly available to address this problem too- it's not a solution if it makes a house unliveable.

I'm about at the point of prototyping the basic working parts of the sun-tracking part, I have a number of ideas on how to do a turbine for this with extremely low friction and my thoughts are to have a tesla turbine that has the magnets to power the coils as the primary generator, and to have these spinning discs (which can be stamped sheetmetal, and this is actually probably better for electrical properties because it has more controllable eddy currents- that's why you see motors with stamped out sheets all stacked up and bolted together, rather than blocks cast or machined to size, sometimes), this can be mag-leved between an upper and lower plane of magnets, and if this were on a central non-connected spindle to keep it mechanically centered, that would probably be most practical. Around the outside of this, the turbine injector nozzles, my thought is to use a pipe casing, drill in-line with the flat plane of the surface of the circle at the outside, and to thread in nozzles (so that the steam pressure can be tuned from all sides) and to have this in a second pipe chamber to equalize the pressure around all those nozzles.

Right now, my parts list for the sun tracking portion are a a raspberry pi + tensor flow, as a software component to do object recognition from the picture it is looking at of the sky + a stepper hat to control + 2x nema 19 stepper motors as a rotational x and y axii, and I'm kind of considering adding a z axis just because that is much more stable and intuitive for the people using it, and this would allow for rotational correction of orientation. The heat collector portion, I have some small prototype pieces of copper tubing that I have been bending into coils- it looks i bit like a halogen light filament, but made of 1/4" copper tubing for refrigerators- and my intent is basically to cast this into aluminum or aluminum bronze (aluminum + copper + zinc + nikel), which is a really durable material that has excellent heat conduction properties to make this 1/4" tubing have a larger metal outside body to collect heat with. I also think this is probably a good material for the rest of the turbine assembly, if it needs to be cast, because it's very light and non-reactive, and it has great machining attributes that make it a good choice for something like this, I think. Certainly much more durable than plain 'ol aluminum casting by itself would be.

And, I think it would be really cool to have a more powerful version of the fresnel lens assembly that actually focuses the sunlight on this boiler piece to do the actual metal melting- sunlight is scary powerful, yo, I've seen a fresnel lens from a big screen TV melt rock and glass together in less than half a minute. If something like that could reasonably and safely be aimed and controlled, it would be a very powerful tool in the DIY manufacturing arsenal. But, this is probably a topic best left for another day.

To recap, I'm suggesting a raspberry pi ("small cheap computer") controlled turret ("thing that looks left and right, and up and down") to aim a fresnel lens (google it!) at the sun, so that the sunlight collects on a piece of metal with water going through it ("the boiler"), from which it is routed through a turbine (which doesn't move with the lens, so that's clear). And, for cloudy days and nights and other sunless/power-needing occasions, the same turbine could be run with steam from other sources, such as the suggested biogas digester/collector.

What are the obvious bozo-nono's, what should I know about, what should I avoid, what did I get wrong in my statements above? Do you have some criticism to make- and importantly, some fix to suggest so that your criticism can solve the problem? I'd love to see what you guys can come up with on this- the basic goal is to get something approximately consumer-generator-sized that can match a consumer generator's power output, more or less. SWOT?