California retiring its concentrating solar thermal plants

[dan_b]

https://cleantechnica.com/2021/09/20/wo ... -capacity/

Thought this was interesting - this tech has never really taken off - and it's being replaced by plain old solar PV.

[Stinsy]

Utterly unsurprising. I'm sure a lot of people got rich raking in all the investment/ R&D money though. Someone on the radio was going on about Nuclear Fusion the other day, touting it yet again as "one breakthrough from providing unlimited, cheap, safe, power". However if the billions currently being funnelled into the various fusion research programs where instead spent on implementing: wind, solar, and storage technologies that already exist, we'd already have solved our energy needs.

[dan_b]

I'm not sure whether the billions going into R&D into fusion (e.g. ITER in France) weren't being spent there, that they would instead be spent on actual deployment of existing tech. They're completely different sectors of the economy with different objectives and skillsets? But what it does do is allow the FUDSTERS to say "oh but there's this new tech round the corner (solid-state batteries, nuclear fusion, CCS, green hydrogen blah blah) so there's no point doing anything different NOW".

I can imagine that back in the 60s the idea of concentrated solar power seemed like a logical way of capturing sunlight energy to make electricity. But R&D was also being done on photovoltaics. And eventually that R&D paid off on an absolute global scale several decades later?

[AE-NMidlands]

Isn't the problem that power plants using turbines usually depend on having a condensor system - which is why most big thermal power stations, coal or nuclear, are on big rivers, lakes or by the sea?
I have always wondered how these things work in hot dry places!

Then there is always the problem of people ("Entrepreneurs," or shysters in my mind) jumping on the bandwagon and milking it. SWMBO showed me another one today, looked like a (unidirectional) underwater delta-wing plane for putting in the Menai Strait - if I have remembered it correctly.

I think the one off the N coast of Scotland only has to cope with flows in 1 direction, doesn't the Menai Strait flow both ways?
A