CSP industry knows that. They talked about it a lot in a conference that they had recently here in Madrid, in El Escorial. Flat PV is simple, proven and reliable. Sometimes it is a pity “the industry”, or “the money” goes so slowly but it is like that, and you will have trouble changing that.

First thanks for your explanation,
My question was due to the fact that countrys like my own, France, have very limited “desert” space area, in fact not at all as far as i know.
So solar energy land-use will always have to compete with agricultural land use.
So the higher ratio in land usage, the easier to install and be worthy.
Project are on their way, as you reported it, to install CSP in North Africa, that is not so far away, and if everybody play the game, it should work fine.

Renewable energy systems do not often have very high power density/space requirements. As technology has become more efficient these space requirements will go down. (take a look at the five megawatt wind turbines coming out of Germany right now, this whole field of pv could have been just three wind turbines)

CSP has a higher density, but it requires a different kind environment, think desert, think hot, think lots and lots of sun. PV on the other hand can work in just about any climate. Check out this map
http://www.blog.thesietch.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/sunbelt_map.jpg

for a good idea of where CSP would be good.

I tend to agree that CSP is a very slick solution to power generation, but I think that soon PV cells will get very efficient and therefore become a very effective way to produce power. Part of that growth is going to be demonstrating that you can make a lot of power (11Mw) with pv. This will drive the market to grow.

Frankly I don’t know which is cheaper to run, or install, I would imagine that CSP would come out ahead. I would also like to think that these people did some sort of cost analysis before they dropped what must be a considerable amount of cash on this project, to figure out what would be the best way to go.

Like you said many solutions is the way to go. Silver buckshot, not silver bullet. Thanks for the comment.

11 MW over 150 acre seems few compared with 64 MW over 400 acre for Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) at Nevada’s Solar One Power Plant
(http://www.blog.thesietch.org/2007/03/24/nevadas-solar-one-power-plant/)

That gives :
-13.63 acres for 1 MW with photovoltaics
-6.25 acres for 1 MW with CSP

Plus the fact that heat can easily be stored for the night or no-sun time.
What do you think of the comparison ?
Are the conditions required the same ?
What does it cost for installation and maintenance ?

Why is everyone focused on one solution instead of the two ?

Many questions ….
Keep on the good work

Now if only we could get the buggers to switch their air con off ;-)