There is no reason, other than fat solar power subsidies, to do solar in the image of nuclear isolated in the deserts.  These old and expensive hot oil solar troughs can scale quickly due to industrial experience.  Sexy big money pictures sell NYT stories.

Modern solar technologies will be located near where people live, and be cost effective sources of heat, cooling, and power without subsidies.  NYT is in the muck telling old stories about expensive old solar technology.  We can do much better.  And do it in more diverse climates.

Sunflower, lets have both.  Why choose?   Remember, silver buck-shot, not a silver bullet.

Because insisting that we don't prioritize is just a futile waste of effort.

_

That said, I like Google's approach.

Solar Thermal with Heat Storage
Hot Rock Geothermal
High Altitude Wind

All of em have the potential to scale rapidly, with no real supply chain limitations, and high reliability.

And any single one of them hitting pay-dirt could be all we could ever need.

I like Mat Wald's writing and the NYT.  They could do better than report that solar is expensive.  Solar thermal power is not an objectionable waste of money, not like war and corruption is.  

Why solar power?  To save natural gas?  Well then say so.  Examine solar that saves natural gas directly for all applications like heating, cooling, industrial process heat, power, and so on.  There are wide assortments of solar technologies that are cost effective for the displacement of natural gas.  When done right, solar is cost effective compared to oil, gas, coal, and electricity.  Do not buy the argument that solar must be subsidized, in the desert, and is still not competitive.   Damn lies.  Not true.  

For the engineers out there:  Ausra is a 30-sun concentrator with horrendous cosine loses and very low thermal to electric efficiencies. Vinod will polish Ausra and sell it.

"He was trying to produce as much electricity as possible while saving heat to tide the plant over as clouds cast episodic shadows on the solar array. "I've been fighting it all day," he said."

This is what storage does.  The hot oil melting wax, for instance, would bridge the cloudy gaps.  Stabilizing the output.

The better, cheaper design that Google is funding melts salt at a much higher temperature.  Mirrors direct the solar energy to a tower where it is collected to melt the salt, then the water is boiled from the heat stored in the molten salt.

Allowing longer term storage, 6 hours it says in the times article, with evacuated insulation like a thermos bottle.

Transporting the heat with hot oil over a square mile is inefficient.  With the tower method the light itself does the transportation, focused on the central tower.  The older technology heating oil with trough collectors is obsolete already.

The solar tower energy system should not be done on wilderness desert land, it should be located on factory roofs or on land already destroyed by industrial or mining use.  

A portion of the revenue generated by the solar syatem should be used to rehabilitate these sites back to natural conditions.  Industrial sites and factories will already have power lines nearby.

The mirrors in the tower system have a very low impact on the land, unlike this trough system in the Times article.

Concentrating solar PV and heat cogeneration mounted on rooftops will already compete with the tower system on cost per kwh and the power can be stored as heat or cold with geo heat exchange heating/cooling.  A 10 cent per kwh subsidy direct to homeowners for these systems would make it beat this technology to mass production and adoption.

the solar tower technology is not something to subsidize heavily, let energy intensive industries use it on factory roofs and over parking lots.  

And use the solar furnace heat directly for heating production materials, then cogenerate electric power from the waste heat as the molten material cool.  Glass and metal recycling and silicon refining would be good industrial uses for this scheme.

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The biggest solar collector is the ocean.  Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) is a promising technology to use the ocean surface waters and very deep waters as a giant heat pump. Much of the truly deep water is polar melt water that cycles through the oceans. For coastal areas with access to deep water, OTEC is certainly promising.

Onward through the fog

OTEC, desalinization, and floating wind/wave/ocean current energy platforms.  They all seem to converge into a real inexhaustable  coastal renewable energy source and potential GHG beating solution.

GHG free desalinization can provide green where drought has produced firestorm and desert, and those green areas create clouds that reflect solar energy.

The multiple source energy harvested by floating platforms tapping into ocean and wind energy provides steady power as well as peak power related to wind and waves.  Desalinization can store the peak energy as fresh water, water that helps cure climate disaster.

This is great technology, great economy reviving technology.

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Yes, solar towers over existing industries.

For storage, pile drive 6 inch steam pipes (ends capped) 100 feet into the sand, fill with 700F condensate from solar steam collectors, then allow steam discharge for 24 hour supply.  Low cost and high efficiency.  No fuss, no mess.  Eliminates the need for molten salt, hot oil, wax, and dangerous pressure vessels.

These are the early primitive days of the solar age.  The resource and cost of using solar energy does pencil out.  Use the imagination.

 Because insisting that we don't prioritize is just a futile waste of effort.

Right, nobody wants a foolish endeavor wasting time.  But solar thermal doesnt look like a waste of time.  Its just imperfect.  But they do work and the one in Arizona will even turn a profit in few years.

The more the merrier.

Google's ideas do look good.   I wonder if you can put ad space on a high altitude kite...

That works by accelerating the chimney effect with solar heated air.  Then placing wind turbines in the air flow up the chimney.

We are talking fields of mirrors (plastic ones) that all focus solar energy on a collector in a tower.  That titanic heat melts salt for energy storage or boils water for steam directly, or both.  Google is in on it.  It looks good.  Better, cheaper mirrors were the main improvement.

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We may see energy intensive industries moving to very sunny regions for the cheap solar furnace process power.  Smelting with solar power?

Using CO2 collected from from biogas grid backup power plants) to substitue for the coal and oxygen in steel making?

That would even cause steel manufacturing to take some CO2 back out of the atmosphere if there was a shortage of CO2 from biogas.

All other industries that have high heat processes would want solar furnace power too.  This would also produce titanic amounts of cogenerated waste heat, that couldf be turned into very cheap clean kwhs after the sun goes down..  all night long.

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I'm very encouraged by this thread. While I think that a distributed power grid is ultimately our best bet, solar thermal is a great bridge and will probably prove to be an essencial provider of our energy needs for some time.

There are also some interesting developments in urban wind power with a company here in Chicago called Aerotecture. Their turbines use a helical structure to take advantage of relatively low gusting winds generated by skyscrapers in the urban environment and avoid the spin-off and ice-shedding problems of traditional windmills.  Coupled with local solar and augmented by solar-thermal, geothermal, ocean, etc. and we just might get away from fossil fuels in time. Here's hoping!

Rob, we have mentioned those here, mounted on the high wind areas of buildings they are excellent.   Distributed small and medium wind is very good.  

I like the idea of powering factories with solar furnace/electric cogeneration mirror and tower systems on their roof.  Even in less effective solar opocations that 250 degree process heat that sunflower mentioned could be captured and stored for 24/7 operation.

This kind of installation, and large wind machines, where suitable, and offshore floating wind/wave energy systems providing power for factories could contribute a lot of power to a distributed renewable smart grid.

The beauty of this plan is that most power would be generated on rooftops and very few large systems, like wind, wave, and solar thermal would be needed.  And they could have a very low impact on the land, maybe even a positive rehabilitative effect through a fraction of power grid generation revenues devoted to reclaiming devestated industrial sites.

Too bad we can't seem to get politicians to get interested in this.  They dwell on lobbyist schemes instead, clean coal, nukes, ethanol fuel farming.  Conservation with plugin hybrid vehicles and geo heat exchange heating/cooling is almost unknown.  Even though bush has solar PV and geo heat exchange at his "ranch".

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The waste heat can be used for annual heat storage, by condensing the working fluid employing geo heat exchange, with heat transfer tubing running under building complexes or even under cities.  Heat a city in cold, sunny regions with heat transfer tubing running under everything.  

With adsorption cooling, the waste heat from solar thermal could even be used for air conditioning, in cities like vegas or pheonix peak solar cooling production could be stored in malls and other large buildings.

Cogeneration would work well with solar furnace installations.

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