Solar thermal plants use mirrors to concentrate sunlight into a small area to produce heat, which is used to make steam for driving power generators. Some solar thermal plants consist of acres of parabolic mirrors focusing sunlight on tubes containing liquids, which then heat water into steam. Another configuration involves gigantic dish mirrors concentrating sunlight onto a Stirling engine, which drives a piston that turns a power generator.
Technology invented: In 1981 the Solar One thermal power plant was built in Daggett, California, as a joint project of the U.S. Department of Energy, Southern California Edison, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and the California Energy Commission.
Federal research dollars since 1976: $2.5 billion
Carbon emitted: none
Cost per facility: $12.5 billion
Production cost of a kilowatt-hour: 17.9 cents
Estimated production cost of a kilowatt-hour in 2025: 17.9 cents
Waste: None, except for waste water from cleaning mirrors.
Advantage: Solar thermal plants produce no air pollution, create little or no noise, and require no fuel.
Disadvantage: Like wind turbines, solar thermal plants rely on an intermittent energy source and take up a lot of space. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has received applications for more than 130 projects in the desert Southwest that could occupy more than 1 million acres (more than 1,500 square miles).
Representative example: In March 2009, NV Energy announced plans to build a $1 billion solar thermal plant in Southern Nevada that will be able to produce 250 megawatts at its maximum capacity.
Silicon solar photovoltaic
Photovoltaic solar cells are thin disks of highly purified silicon crystals that convert sunlight directly into electricity. Technology invented: Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson developed the silicon photovoltaic cell at Bell Labs in 1954.
Federal research dollars since 1976: $3.6 billion
Carbon emitted: none
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Shannon Love|11.14.09 @ 1:16PM|#
This is a good article but it overlooks the most important cost factor. It doesn't matter how much it cost to generate a watt of electricity at the generation source, it only matters what it cost to receive a kilowatt of electricity at the point of consumption.
A good example of this would the real world cost of electricity from a portable diesel generator. You could calculate how much the generator cost and the average cost of diesel but that wouldn't tell you how much a kilowatt would cost if the generator was located in the wilds of Alaska and all the diesel had to be flown in. Likewise, the cost of hydroelectric power has to include the cost of transmission from were geology dictates the dam has to be to the point of consumption.
Since weather-dependent generation cannot produce power anything close to 24/7/365, the cost per kilowatt at the point of consumption has to include all cost of increased transmission, any energy storage systems and (far more realistically) the fossil fuel and nuclear plants that will always have to be running in the background to take up the slack with less than a half hour notice.
Electricity is not a luxury and it is not something we can do without. A modern economy is basically just a system for using electricity to turn dirt into useful things. We have to have electricity when and where we need all the time. Weather-dependent generation cannot provide that and has such it remain a toy for the foreseeable future.
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