A good while. There's actually a plant of this design (smaller though, only 20MW) outside of Seville, it's been there for a while. Also, to the sister post, th

A good while. There's actually a plant of this design (smaller though, only 20MW) outside of Seville, it's been there for a while. Also, to the sister post, there are relatively few moving parts in the collector itself. Furthermore, these are all conditions that we've dealt with already with traditional turbine systems (they get pretty hot too), and aircraft design. The harder part is getting the sun tracking right. The Seville (and I guess this one too) plant actually has to point a bunch of mirrors off the tower (they park them into a tower of light above the tower... looks really cool) at peak, since it actually gets too hot (it would melt concrete or something ridiculous I heard...) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS20_solar_power_towers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS20_solar_power_towers