More Solar Thermal Plants like in California likely won't be built

California's Record-Breaking New Solar Plant Is Already Irrelevant

By Rob Wile 2 hours ago

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Last week, dozens of people, including Google energy chief Rick Needham and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, trekked out to the California-Nevada border in the middle of the Death Valley to dedicate what is believed to be the world's largest solar thermal facility in the world.
At 392 megawatts, the Ivanpah solar thermal plant will be able to power 140,000 homes — the equivalent of all of Newark (averaging two people per household).
We covered the project when BrightSource, the main developer behind the project, first put up a stunning 3-D tour of the site.
But for all its scale and beauty, in terms of the future of renewables, Ivanpah is already irrelevant.
Solar thermal creates electricity by using mirrors to direct intense amounts of heat at a centralized collector, which is used to heat a substance like water to create steam power. Solar photovoltaic, meanwhile, directly converts solar energy into electricity through semiconductors.
If solar thermal sounds unnecessarily complicated, you're right. Solar photovoltaic has seen explosive growth in the past few years thanks to plummeting material costs, state incentives, and eco-conscious homebuyers putting up panels on their roofs.  But solar thermal growth has stalled, and is expected to continue to do so.  Ivanpah cost $2.2 billion. Warren Buffett paid the same amount for the world's largest photovoltaic plant just up the road outside Bakersfield. That plant will generate 1.5-times as much power as Ivanpah.

As the New York Times' Diane Cardwell and Matt Wald wrote Friday, Ivanpah probably represents an end, not a beginning. 

"When BrightSource and other companies asked [investor] NRG to invest in a second thermal project, said David Crane, NRG’s chief, he responded: 'We’ve got $300 million invested in Ivanpah — let me see that work for a few months and then we’ll decide whether we want to be involved in more.' "

And here's what Lux Energy analyst Matthew Feinstein told them:

“I don’t think that we’re going to see large-scale solar thermal plants popping up, five at a time, every year in the U.S. in the long-term — it’s just not the way it’s going to work...  Companies that are supplying these systems have questionable futures. There’s other prospects for renewables and for solar that look a lot better than this particular solution.” 

It's not that Ivanpah itself won't be cost-effective. BrightSource locked in a 20-year power purchase agreement with local utilities that includes fixed pricing, and the vast majority of costs were borne up front, according to Shayle Kann, director of GTM Research. That means the Energy Department, which lent the project $1.6 billion, and Google, which put up $168 million, will likely see a decent return. 

"So it's not so much an issue for Ivanpah as it is for any future solar thermal project," he told us in an email.

But it's a sign of how fast renewable energy technology is moving these days.

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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/californias-record-breaking-solar-plant-164035414.html

If I understand this article correctly what has happened is that when this plant was engineered and constructed this was the state of the art way to generate electricity. However, now because of phovoltaics prices dropping quickly and efficiency growing in them sort of like what happened to microchips from the 1980s to the 1990s and 2000s to now, plants like Buffets nearby of photovotaics will soon genertae 1.5 times the capacity of the Solar Thermal Plant. So, just on a level of efficiency it looks like photovoltaics growing and growing in efficiency is the new "It" technology for power generation on earth.

In the last 6 months or so I do know that solar energy became more efficient than any other power source for places like California, India and China and as it gets even more efficient in the future it likely will pass every other power source for the rest of the world as well in just being more cost efficient than any other thing that generates electricity dollar for dollar within the next few years.