Green, but definitely not cheap or stable. Thermal solar is not very efficient and the plants are extremely complicated. They use molten salts that can freeze

Green, but definitely not cheap or stable. Thermal solar is not very efficient and the plants are extremely complicated. They use molten salts that can freeze solid inside the pipes, and are also extremely potent oxidizers capable of starting huge fires. Ivanpah is expensive and consistently underperforms and has to make up the difference with natural gas. It freezes solid each night and has to be reheated. The nature of thermal solar also means you can't really take advantage of scale, so the problems aren't likely to get any better even if they get built even bigger. There is essentially zero chance that solar thermal will ever be better than batteries. Ivanpah has 392 MW of capacity @ $2.2 billion, and produces 1.75 GWh per day. Utility scale solar panels are below $1.42/watt[1]- $557 million installed, with land, tax, and inverters. The average price of lithium batteries is below $150/kWh, which would be 788 million for 3 days of storage. Altogether that's 61% the cost of Ivanpah using the average prices from last year. It's also roughly on par with current electricity prices (12.2 cents vs 10.3 cents, but NB residential is 12.6 cents) Solar city claims panels costing 55 cents per watt and Tesla expects to get below $100/kWh for cells by 2020. If those prices held the cost for a solar plant with 3 days of storage would be 740 million, and the cost of electricity would be 6.8 cents/kWh. [1]: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2016/09/29/nrel-u-s-utility-scale-solar-costs-fell-below-1-50-per-watt-in-q1-2016-with-charts/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2016/09/29/nrel-u-s-utility-scal...