Solar thermal power is considered an important step towards developing large scale sources of clean electricity, but within this sector there are some very distinct applications of the technology.  Bright Source Energy, with offices in Oakland, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel, is building next generation “power tower” solar thermal power plants.

The power tower.
(Photo: Bright Source Energy)

The stated advantages of [...]

Believe it or not, with hundreds upon hundreds of entries - most of them lengthy diatribes filled with quantitative factoids - we have never posted a press release.  Well everything comes in good time, and this is an interesting press release.  Heat transfer and heat storage fluid indeed!  This is the missing link, the central point, [...]

According to SolarBuzz.com, solar modules of 125 watts (peak) or higher are selling for about $4.80 per watt.  To make a long story short, that price is still way too expensive to compete with regular utility-produced electricity.  If you want to install a photovoltaic system on your home or business, expect a price tag, after labor and [...]

If you want to make money, you better have a contingency for a future where there’s global cooling, and brokers populate the streetcorners with signs that say “will trade carbon credits for food.”  No rational investor fails to prepare for likely eventualities - and the precautionary principle that informs global warming alarm will not help your portfolio when global [...]

Which of these solutions is more space efficient? 
If you assume 5.0 watts (peak) per square foot for thin film photovoltaic, you end up requiring 4.6 acres per peak megawatt-hour (MWp), about the same as Nevada Solar One’s solar thermal farm (4.7 acres per MWp). Thin film PV panels now have a factory cost of about [...]

If you can’t make rooftop photovoltaics pay financially without feed in tariffs, tax credits, accellerated depreciation, rebates, and subsidized loans - and even with all that it’s still barely better financially than just sticking to natural gas or coal fired grid electricity - how on earth can something like this succeed at the utility scale?

Solar fields in [...]

Finally a design that could work on flat roofs that combines an efficient heat collection plumbing with 2-axis motion for the concentrators.  Heliotron Energy from Greece has a design that puts an array of single-axis concentrators onto a rotating turntable, which gives the concentrators 2-axis capability.
Each concentrator is about one square foot in size, and they each [...]