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Good point. But do subsidies, research funds, and general sentiment support that? I primarily see investment in PV - not solar thermal. Got a preference I can l

• Jedd 8y ago
  No idea about subsidies, research, and gen-pop attitudes around the two. Solar thermal has a couple of advantages - peak supply extends through into peak demand (around sunset), because it's basically its own storage system - efficiency is around 70% (compared to PVC which is ~ 15%, and is expected to rise very gently - as you noted in another thread). The lack of sensitivity to technology improvements makes it more attractive to investors, which is convenient as it's obviously a larger capex per installation. (I suspect R&D for pvc is higher per, say, unit of technology - though this isn't a big concern in terms of capex per user.) Either way, most nation states have electricity grids that lend themselves to larger power generation installations, than a totally distributed system (where someone else looks after short term storage and baseload) - plus larger installations (solar thermal) work well in regions where there are disparate climates within the reach of long-haul power cables. (Definitely the case in AU for most major metropolitan areas - there are solar-thermal-favourable sites within a few hundred kilometres of the larger population centres.) I've just done a pvc vs cst - and the latter's numbers really make a mockery of the anti-solar apologists' estimates on surface area required to provision estimated power requirements.