Our state has the best solar “resources” (see map on page 7)[warning:PDF] in the country, but for quite some time the promise of using the sun to produce steam to make electricity has been in front of us with seemingly nothing ever coming of it. 

Things have certainly changed.  Solar thermal power plants are beyond the pilot/demonstration stage – they’re here for real now.  The technology and price point is proven enough that the big players are knocking at the doors of solar energy producers to buy their clean electricity.

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Check it out: Silicon Valley venture capitalists are funding construction of solar-powered steam generating power plants, utilities(1) (2) are signing multi-year contracts to buy their power, and the regulatory environment will sooner or later (hopefully sooner) make fossil-fuel based forms of electricity generation more expensive.

The real “game changers” it seems to me are that this technology doesn’t require costly semiconductor material to produce electricity and it can actually store the heat generated until when it’s needed to produce power.  So if you want to supply energy even though the sun’s already gone down or it’s cloudy, you can still do that. 

If enough power lines can be built to get the power where it needs to go – much of it toward southern California, then solar thermal energy is going to be a big player in the energy mix in coming years. 

Here’s something to make your eyes bleed next time you think about our great victory in 2006.  One of those winners was Dianne Feinstein (D-Establishment).  And here’s what she had to say about the President after sharing a plane with him to California to survey wildfire damage, apparently a reward for shepherding through the confirmation of Leslie Southwick to the federal bench.

With a 7:40 a.m. Thursday departure from Andrews Air Force Base, Feinstein found herself seated in the rear of the plane with a handful of Southern California congressional representatives. After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage and French toast, Bush popped back for what the senator described as a frank two-hour conversation, mostly about foreign policy […]

“I found the discussion extraordinarily positive,” Feinstein said. “I came away with a very different view about him.” […]

As for the president’s performance on the ground?

“It was a wonderful thing to see, to be candid,” Feinstein said. “I saw a warm, caring human being.”

As the link above shows, during the 2006 election Feinstein was talking about removing all US forces from Iraq and serious Constitutional crises.  But when allowing a far-right loon to serve on the federal bench gets you all the Presidential mints and fluffy pillows you want, why bother being anything but gracious?  After all, everyone in Washington is so nice and personable!