Sunlight, only stronger: Rethinking solar

[jpak]

http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/580877.html

The five-decade quest for cheap solar power has produced an alternative energy that's still about four times more expensive than conventional electricity.

But a group of local physicists, engineers and astronomers hope to be the first to break the cost barrier of solar energy. Their solution: concentrating sunlight to magnify its power.

If they succeed, the cost of generating solar energy on a large scale could compete with a nuclear or coal-burning power plant -- minus the radioactive waste or greenhouse gases.

MegaWatt Solar has been building and testing the concept in Hillsborough since last year. The company plans to assemble a working model next week, combining a battery of reflectors with a computerized tracking system borrowed from high-powered telescopes.

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[Trajan]

1. Is this a new idea ?

Wasn't this 'breakthrough' introduced some decades ago with the Solar One energy plant ?

Many reflectors controlled by computer to focus energy on one point ? ... For Solar One; that was a boiler that drives a turbine ?

It's a great idea, and should be duplicated everywhere it can be, but it isn't new idea by any means ....

Archimedes allegedly aligned Greek sailors along a shoreline with polished shields that supposedly burned a whole in water vessels.

Shrugs ...

[jpak]

2. Different technologies - Solar One was thermal, this is concentrating PV (direct conversion)

n/t

[NNadir]

3. It's a "breakthrough" announced every 10 years, after the last previous years of solar failure.

You must have a memory.