-=> Quoting Jim Dunmyer to Paul Tortora <=-
 JD> You should subscribe to Home Power Magazine for starters. But be
 JD> aware that you are setting a very significant goal for your design.
 JD> Making something that relies on only solar power, yet capable of
 JD> delivering 1KW continously is no small task, especially if it MUST be
 JD> reliable. Doing the first 90% of the job is hard enough, but factoring
 JD> in that period of 3 weeks without sunshine complicates your job
 JD> tremendously. Especially if you're to keep it entirely solar-powered
 JD> (as opposed to installing a fuel-powered generator for those periods). 
     Thanks for the input, Jim.  Since you sound interested, let me tell you
a bit more about this project and pose a few more questions.
     The institution I attend is The Cooper Union (Manhattan, NY).  The
design of this power supply will be based upon a solar energy system that
has been under development for years at the school, called 'the Starfuel
system' (it's even got some patents).  To be as brief as possible: the
system collects solar energy via a normal PV array.  The current is
stabalized through an LCB (linear current booster).  This current is sent to
electrolyzers, which split water into hydrogen and oxygen.  The hydrogen is
the important part; it is purified and stored in hydride storage tanks.  The
energy of the hydrogen is then converted to steady state current using a fuel
cell (recombining the hydrogen with oxygen releases energy).  This info and
more can be found in publicly available technical papers.
     Our concern, of course, is the "state of the industry" of currently
available 1 kW power supplies.  Of major concern in the demand a customer
would put on such a device; does an owner of such a device constantly demand
1 kW or does power use vary during the day??  I suppose an owner of a private
home might vary his/her demand, while a filming expedition, for instance,
might need to constantly demand 1 kW.
     Criticisms I've heard from one person on gas powered 1 kW supplies:
noisy, fumes, the trouble of transporting gasoline.  Our device is ideally
quiet, emissionless, and requires nothing but the sun.  Even in cloudy 
weather,
I believe PV arrays can harness some respectable power.
     Any more comments, Jim?
                                                  --Paul Tortora
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