Oh, I see. Cyclic thermal stresses from clouds then? Yeah, the stuff I'm familiar with is solar thermal water splitting using iron oxide at ~1000C, though I ca

Oh, I see. Cyclic thermal stresses from clouds then? Yeah, the stuff I'm familiar with is solar thermal water splitting using iron oxide at ~1000C, though I can see why the Caltech group preferred ceria (my favorite ceramic). I think my favorite cute trick with solar thermal is solar thermal reforming of biomass. By piggybacking on the existing chemical reaction you actually end up with solar energy directly added to the chemical energy! First time I saw that I was struck by how clever it was. I imagine using CO2 as a reactant is a lot more difficult, that's not a simple molecule to break apart so I very much appreciated that the solar thermal reforming process takes advantage of the plants to do the hard part while extracting even more solar energy.