🌞 Solar Power 🌞 as a Small Community Green Power Source #1

You may not have noticed but The US has "funded" research into solar electric plants many times.

They did so in the 50s
They did so in the 70s
They did so in the 90s

And in each case, they researched and where starting to get somewhere, and then... nothing.
The funding wasn't "cut", but somehow, the accounts were empty, bills and people weren't paid, etc.

Image of Solar Two Power Tower Project

The US built a test site called Solar two which reflected solar energy onto a tower that melted salt. This molten salt was kept in a storage tank to later be used to create steam to power an electric generator.

Sooooo, they experimented with it for a while... and then shut it down.
They never produced electricity from it on an ongoing basis.

Can you imagine building a solar power plant, never using it, and then tearing it down?
Me neither, but T.H.E.Y. did.

Turning sunlight into electricity is fairly easy, use the sunlight's heat to boil a refrigerant (water is a favorite) and use the steem pressure to turn the generators.

I have even seen house sized systems. Where they had some trough style collectors and a small steam engine. Making it large enough to support a small community is easy. Making it small enough for a single house is kind of complex. That is the reason you see solar-voltaic panels on homes; no moving parts.

But, solar-voltaic panels are quite inefficient. They only use specific light frequencies. Whereas a solar heating system uses all of the sunlight's energy. It is just more complex.

This is why, building a solar farm for a small community in desert areas would be a very excellent way to bring green energy to these kind of places.

Now, to store energy, a tried and true method is to use a height difference in water.

With the solar power you created, you pump the water from a lower storage tank to a higher storage tank. And when you need power later, you open the gate and let the water fall back down spinning the turbine. It is utter simplicity. It doesn't produce awful gasses or randomly explode like other power storage media.

There have been several attempts to build such things, but after the original hype wears off, the story is buried and we never hear from it again.. I don't see why places like Kalifornia doesn't have dozens of these things just to deal with the spike loads of ACs in the summer. I mean, Kalifornia has hundreds of little mountains next to valleys, given you a couple hundred foot drop in a small horizontal distance. Even without the solar power providing the pump, just balancing day and night loads on power plants makes it worth it.