Dave. The knockers will attack any re-newables right up until their house is powered by them. You cannot blame them for being deluded as there is significant effort going into misinformation.
Stormbay has it right: Corporations are desperately trying to keep centralised power generation and the "energy market" going.
Energy retailing is currently a loss making activity. Most of the players are overseas investors who do not want to have to replace their ancient infrastructure that they paid so much for. Once the government restrictions on price increases lapse, they will start getting their profits.
Most of this infrastructure is about cross subsidising. Households pay for the cheap energy of Alcoa, Holden, Ford, and most other heavy industry. Of course the taxpayers actually paid for most of the infrastructure that was privatised decades ago. What the corporate scrooge politicians don't realise is that it is more important to have real energy infrastructure than 6 profitable banks that require billions in propping up. The cost is similar. I'd rather my taxes went to new solar arrays in north western Victoria (Taswegan, we'll never build them in your neck of the woods. Deserts generally don't have cloudy weeks!)
Folks the analysis has been done and the moneys are starting to flow. All we ask is that Australia is not held back by the oligarchs and cynics. We've given up on actually being innovative world leaders, but can I'm hoping we can drop the dark ages mentality.
BTW. Anyone who suggests nuclear has a big issue: without military funding it is *way* too expensive. No one has actually cleaned one up yet so the hidden cost's are *unknown*. The knowns are already too expensive now. (Except for possible future tech which are not as advanced as solar) Coupled with it's other problems and nuclear just doesn't cut it. Solar thermal, geothermal, wave, tide, wind and local (every house) solar on a modern network is the solution. Recreating the current 20th century model is not going to work going forward.

Ozandy,
I think you're pretty close to the money.
What a number of people seem to miss is the suggestion that the energy crisis will only be solved by niche market technology as there are several different types of solar technology and for different sites the need for one such a large installation is merely theoretical.The solution will eventually be a mix and corporations will exist as exotic switch controllers.

All
My frustration with some of the comments is that they still think in terms of magic bullet 'one size fits no-one' mentality. No one is saying least of all the article that one technology is the answer.
The article talks about at least 4 different technologies and mentions different sites needing different application(s). Nor does there need to be a concentrated humongous wind farm there are at least 5 different technologies there. Then battery storage is improving all the time. To implement all these different technologies there will be a myriad of commercial ops. and squillions of jobs.
Neither will it cause a crash of society as we know it.

Taswegain
Perhaps hydro will be used in some places. Nor does the array cables need to be in hostile territory anymore than Oil is today. Besides Africa is a big place Morocco is not the only option

Reducing the use of fossil fuels is a gradual process, the end goal being their replacement. It seems very likely that solar energy will become increasingly important in this process, particularly in countries which are largely dependent on use of fossil fuels and have no real alternative for generating electricity. However, technology has some way to go before this happens.

The need is for base load power – available 24 x 7 x 365 at prices which are competitive with electricity generated from fossil fuel. Solar can achieve this, but only once the problem of storage has been overcome: Storage of heat and storage of electricity. Or there is significant improvement in the efficiency of photovoltaic cells. Can we discount the latter in the short to medium term? Probably.

That leaves us with the storage problems to solve and as Mr Bielow notes, significant improvements are being made in the storage of heat. These need to progress a lot further before capital and operating costs will reduce generating costs to a level that is competitive with coal. The price of rushing into solar, at least in Australia, is paying more for electricity.

The storage of electricity in the grid itself and improved management of the grid is not an adequate solution to overcoming the problems associated with reduced solar power generation due to lack of sunlight. Better ways of storage are needed and work on this problem has long been underway and at last is showing promising signs. CSIRO is undertaking work on a supercapacitor-battery hybrid which has exciting possibilities and may prove very important. But they are not there yet.

Present costs of generating electricity per MWh are coal $40, wind $60, nuclear $65, geothermal $65, solar-thermal $80, and Solar-voltaic $105. It should be noted that coal emit CO2 and will therefore be required to purchase emission permits which would increase generating costs of about $70/MWh. At least it would, if Government charged coal users for emission licences – something it will not do since they correctly believe to do so would threaten the future of the coal industry.

Mike Pope .... coninued

The next best alternatives in Australia are wind and geothermal. Wind makes a useful contribution but like solar can not supply base load power. Geothermal can produce base load power, produces very little at present but has the potential to meet national needs. Solar-thermal is simply too expensive at present but, as technology improves, the price will come down and may become competitive with alternatives to fossil fuels.

The advantage of solar technology (probably fleeting) is that it is better understood and applied than is geothermal but, once better developed and applied, geothermal will make life difficult for solar-thermal even if storage problems are dealt with quicker. They are not a problem for geothermal, at present the only renewable source of base load.

Mr Bielow raises a number of interesting issues. He notes that transmission of electricity is most efficiently handled as DC, not the AC system now in use. He feels that existing fossil fuelled power stations could and should reduce fossil fuel consumption by using seam produced from solar energy as a supplement. He is right on both issues. But both have yet to occur and seem unlikely to do so anytime soon.

As others have said, whenever these reviews of solar technology are published, all kinds of weird objections surface and the whole idea of a blog like this descends into a mish mash.

Bielow's story was a good summary. True he doesn't get detailed about costs and that's partly because they are not firmed, or they a commercial in confidence.

I know David Mills pretty well and can vouch for the fact that he does not do things that do not make financial sense. He left Australia and established AUSRA in California because he was entrusted with large investment dollars. Since he left, AUSRA have taken a different tack and decided to reduce the size of plants and service an industrial market rather than the grid, although I understand they will still build the 177MW plant for PG&E. The point is that this company like Abengoa and others are in the business of building solar thermal plants. Nothing more nothing less. They find themselves in places on the planet where governments smooth the way.

If such plants are built in the sun belt to supply electricity to the north then so be it, HVDC cabling is not rocket science and fully operational. To talk about sabotage is just irrelevant.

The Australian situation? The government is sidelining. As Mills said to me last October, all they (AUSRA, and Abengoa and others) need is a form of loan guarantee from government gives the imnprimatur the the industry needs - just watch it grow. The government isn't taking so much of a risk.

As the other "knockers" have mentioned, this is not a huge break through, but it is a significant improvement. The technology we are looking for will take decades of engineering and production improvements, as has occurred for existing generation equipment, motor cars etc.

I think we may very well get there in the end, but I get irritated whenever a small advance is trumpeted as the "the solution has been found, and we should soon scrap all fossil fuels".