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.