What better place to put these towers too, with all the sunlight we get here in Oz. It looked like plants growing under the glass plates. What role do they play in the design, do you know?

This doesn't seem very economical. 200MW isn't that much, and certainly not enough to justify the building of such a huge tower.
One good gas fired turbine can produce 520MW.

I think it would take a very long time for that solar tower to save enough CO2 to balance the CO2 that was released in it's production.

its a neat idea and the structure would look cool but the idea is a non-starter. the efficiency is utterly abysmal at something like 5 watts per square meter. solar cells could capture tens of times more of the energy hitting them.

Like the last two said: interesting design, but impractical. Plus it won't be built unless it can be made profitable to investors.

while it seems like it's not practical, it's a prototype. Maybe we can learn from it to make a better version?

The big thing I like about it is it's utterly simple. Almost no moving or complicated parts, so perhaps the maintenance costs could be lower than traditional power plants? It looked like it wouldn't need much staff.

Also, the plants might be an interesting side benefit. Maybe not economical for a power station, but a power station plus a huge greenhouse? Maybe that could be exploited for something interesting...

Photovoltaic cells have less moving parts. That tower has a whole group of turbines which move pretty rapidly.

I'm against Kyoto and for a worldwide carbon tax. This tax should be invested in a huge Apollo (or Manhatten) style project. And we would have cheap efficient solar cells which would cut our energy dependance within a decade.
Also I'm very pro-nuclear.

Well, photovoltaic cells are neat, but they need to be a lot more efficient before they are useful on a wide scale. More importantly, though, they use a lot of nasty heavy metals like all semiconductors.

Also... I think it may be incorrect to say PV cells have less moving parts. The cells themselves are solid state, but you usually have to put them on some sort of moving panel to keep them pointed straight at the sun. If you know of a large-scale power plant design that gets around that, though, I'm interested in seeing it...

This tower still sounds like an interesting experiment.

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