Re: Shouldnt it have a net cooling effect?
 

It won't cool the local area, it will heat it; you're missing the point that it will increase the amount of solar radiation absorbed and converted to heat.

It sounds like a fantastic idea to me. It seems that there could be more than a couple uses for such a structure, other than just power generation and condensation collection of water. Of course, an obvious appilcation would be to top the thing with as many microwave towers as possible... bleh. But even after the airflow hits the turbine fans, there would still be a strong wind.

As to photovoltaic cells, it might seem like a good idea, but they are rather expensive per square foot. In order for them to work, they'd probably have to be

Of course, you'd have to give it a perimeter fencing to keep animals and base jumpers away from it...

To the tower!
 

Australia did sign the Kyoto agreement, but the government was shamefully a leader of the dissent that succeeded in weakening the agreement.
While the tower does create a 'dead zone' underneath it, there was not much there in the first place - this is desert we are talking about and its one thing Australia has a lot of.
It would not be more cost effective to use the area for photoelectric cells, which are expensive and polluting to make, capture 20% of the energy (if you're lucky) and degrade significantly in a decade. The glass or UV hardened transparent plastic that acts as the primary collectors of heat will degrade much more slowly than that.
The beauty of the design is its simplicity. It combines greenhouse and chimney effects with the atmospheric temperature gradient, and the only moving parts are the turbines (also probably shutters to divert the airflow when the turbines need maintenance).
Sure the atmospheric impact in that region will be a topic of research, but I bet its a lot friendlier than mining for coal, oil or uranium, transporting the fuel to a generator and then reacting the stuff to make steam.
Even a 50m black tower with a greenhouse at the bottom might produce significant power for a farm house.

So how's this compare to a solar-powered steam turbine? The last time I heard about tower power, it consisted of an array of mirrors on the ground pointing to a boiler on the top of the tower. Wouldn't that be more efficient?

http://www.westernpower.com.au/html/...#albanygallery

Has some nice pics of an Australian wind farm being constructed. They are also working on a program to produce energy from large tidal shifts in the ocean.

Those wind generator pictures are impressive, though quite a number of potential sites (and some actual ones) have locals protesting the construction, mainly because they say it ruins their view and devalues their land. I'd still rather that than a shiny new coal fired generator.
Then there is wave power, and an Australian innovation is to combine a parabolic collector to focus wavefronts from various directions into a point, above which a tapering funnel is situated that leads to a 2 way air turbine.
http://www.energetech.com.au/