Photo: Public domain, Sandia Labs

The Search Giant is Working on Cheaper Mirrors
Solar thermal power has a bright future (ha!), but at the moment the biggest hurdle in the way of wider adoption is capital cost. All those mirrors cost a lot of money and add up to a significant portion of the total cost of a solar thermal power plant. Thats why Google’s energy division has been working on making cheaper mirrors. Bill Weihl, the company’s green energy czar, claims that their latest prototype could cut by …Read the full story on TreeHugger

Proposed Ivanpah CA Solar Power Complex. Image credit:Brightsource.

In 2008 we learned that – BrightSource [was] to Build 500 Megawatts of Solar-Thermal Power in Mojave Desert. By fall the proposed project had become a very visible symbol of a bright future for concentrated solar power (CSP) in California. See Matt’s story: Br…Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo: BrightSource

Solar thermal power developer BrightSource Energy has literally gigawatts of power plants in the works — but very little actually completed so far. Greentech Media calls the financing of all these one of the big questions in renewable energy, and it certainly is. A bit of light has …Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo: BrightSource Energy

Solar thermal power developer BrightSource Energy has begun construction on a 29 MW power plant in Coalinga, California, but rather than generating electricity from the steam produced by the system, the whole thing will aid in the recovery of oil for Chevron. The New York Times has the details:…Read the full story on TreeHugger

Acme’s power plants will use the same technology as shown here in this photo from eSolar. Acme owns a 5% stake in the California-based company.

Acme Group has announced that it’s on track to get the first half of it’s first 10 MW solar thermal power plant online at the beginning of 2010, Cleantech reports. The plant uses the same technology as in eSolar‘s Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo: eSolar

Back in February it was announced that NRG Energy and eSolar would be developing 500 MW of solar power plants in the desert Southwest, with the electricity going to Southern California Edison. Here’s an update on that: eSolar (sans-NRG this time) has taken the first small step towards that goal, completing its first utility-scale solar thermal power tower in Lancaster, California:…Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo: Army.mil via flickr

Last October, the US Army announced that it would be developing a 500 MW solar thermal power plant at Fort Irwin, California. At the time details as to who would be developing the project and when it might come online were lacking, but we now have more details on that (via Greent…Read the full story on TreeHugger