Solar Thermal Power Is Hitting the Big Time

Check this out: Venture capitalists are funding construciton of solar-powered steam generating power plants, utilities 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.

My guess is that the bottleneck will be on building the powerlines necessary to bring the power to where it needs to go.

This graphic on how solar thermal power generation works is very informative.

The real "game changers" it seems to me are that this technology doesn't require costly semiconductor material to produce electricity, it can actually store the heat generated so that power can be produced when it's needed, even if the sun has gone down.