Earlier this year, on October 27th, Ausra commissioned their first solar thermal pilot plant, a 5.0 megawatt facility located in Kimberlina, just north of Bakersfield, California. It is the first solar thermal power facility to be commissioned in California in over 20 years - significantly, the approximately 350 megawatts of solar thermal power installed back [...]

A company that is quietly competing to possibly become the biggest manufacturer of thin film photovoltaics on earth is Optisolar, headquartered in Hayward, California.  Optisolar already has a manufacturing plant at their Hayward headquarters, and has just signed a lease to construct a 600,000 square foot manufacturing plant in Sacramento, California.  (ref. Sacramento Housing & [...]

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 [...]