Concentrating solar power: It’s a good bet for the future by Keith Lovegrove

Over the last two and a half years or so, it has been my great pleasure and privilege to have had the opportunity, along with my close friend and colleague Wes Stein, to have acted as editor for a new book that has just been published – Concentrating Solar Power Technology: Principles Developments and Applications.

It is quite a technical read, not necessarily ideal for the Christmas list for elderly grandparents or young children (but one shouldn’t generalise). It is, however, an ideal book for engineers and scientists seeking an in depth technical introduction to the field and it also introduces the technologies and approaches in a way that is accessible to those with a non-technical background. It was not the remit of this book to make the detailed commercial case for why we should bother with concentrating solar power (CSP) at all.

In all fields of human endeavour, some lead and some follow fashion. Nations, companies, individuals who have the highest probability of the greatest success are those that successfully pick the trend before the main crowd. My hypothesis here is that CSP represents such an opportunity for Australia.

Readers of RenewEconomy will be very aware of the revolutionary changes the world’s energy industry is experiencing. At the forefront of those changes is the massive and continuing growth of wind and PV. In 2011, global financial turnover in these was around $US230 billion in roughly equal shares. CSP on the other hand was the proverbial mosquito bite on the bum of this sector. However it was a $US2 billion mosquito bite, and it has also been experiencing compound growth of 40 per cent/year for the last six years.