Mirrors are easy to make and maintain. We know steam->electricity really pretty well now. This isn’t photovoltaics. I’d bet that nearly half of the energy comes out of wire. The heat generated and vented is heat you’d get from the Sun anyway. In fact, cooling towers probably radiat this heat into space more efficiently than it would happen naturally.

Contrast this with Nuclear power. The fuel is about $10 per megawatt hour. Nearly free. But the end cost is as high as coal, etc. And that’s without worrying about spent fuel. Why? Well, the stuff is so dangerous that you have to check, double check, triple check, and then provide an absurdly long paper trail for any little thing you do. The result is that it’s just as expensive, if not more than anything else.

As the article implies, for California peak load tends to happen at the times when peak generation would occur, which is handy. Unfortunately that breaks down for the UK (there’s much less air conditioning and it’s colder in winter, so peak energy demands are in winter evenings).

It’s odd, but I’ve seen pricing that implies that solar thermal heating is actually more cost-effective than photovoltaics, even though you have to go through all the extra steps (heating water, running turbines) than you do with something that generates electricity from the start. Presumably this is to do with the high cost and low efficiency of the current generation of solar cells.

Solar heating is also much better in a domestic context - presumably this is what’s referred to in spyder’s comment - since you can heat and store water for domestic use. Storing hot water is a lot easier than storing electricity.

This is an interesting project, but it still strikes me that solar power is awfully inefficient.

-cvj

http://www.energy.gov.on.ca/index.cfm?fuseaction=english.news&body=yes&news_id=149

Anyone?

-cvj

Via Clifford Johnson, a link to a BBC report about the first commercially operating solar thermal power plant in Europe. [...]…