Think how handy something like this would be in Saudi Arabia to run de-sal plants. As long as you have big enough drinking water tanks to handle the occasional

Think how handy something like this would be in Saudi Arabia to run de-sal plants. As long as you have big enough drinking water tanks to handle the occasional weather related or maintenance related you're golden. For example, if you have tanks big enough to hold a week or so of drinking water, then as long as you produce more than a weeks drinking water per week, you're all good. This applies to almost any process that requires energy that is either a long term average or you can store in a tank. Electro-refining copper (good luck keeping aluminum cells warm, lol) or pumping irrigation water into fields. I would imagine you can solar distill ethanol whenever you feel like it, more or less. Given big enough tanks, you could generate chlorine for anything from swimming pool size to municipal water system size. A country needs X megatons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer per season and yes all of it is made today from natgas, but you could theoretically make it from solar power, air, and water, as long as the long term average power generated is high enough to make enough fertilizer per year. Some industries like aluminum refining and some chemical plant work have a batch or shutdown time longer than the average weather related issue, so for basic chemistry scientific reasons they're screwed and will always require coal powered electricity, but most others theoretically only need a couple minutes of UPS power to shut down. Because electrical power is now super cheap, there are industries that have not put the slightest engineering effort on it... think CNC machinery, where there's no scientific reason a machine can't enter "sleep mode" within seconds, and return to work in seconds after sleeping, although in practice no one has ever made or shipped a machine like that, that I know of. As a simple example there are very few gcode programs that don't involve a dwell or toolchange where it could simply sleep in the middle of it, aside from the more difficult task of interrupting a cut. I guess this is an awesome industrial startup idea, not just for CNC machines but numerous other industrial machines. (And edited to add, there are numerous 3rd world areas overseas and California where the coal powered electric grid is totally unreliable, and machines that respond cooperatively to power interruptions would be quite handy even if there's no solar or wind generation involved.) The biggest challenge to solar powering those industries is going to be non-renewable energy is very cheap compared to long term capital costs, so if its cheaper to run on diesel than to let it sit while continuing to paying the bank loan, or if your competitors can out produce you because they're not sunlight limited, then they'll have to run on diesel or coal-based electricity for financial department reasons, even if its no engineering challenge at all to run on intermittent solar power.