Comment Re:Fundamentally hard problem... (Score 1) 272
IMHO concentrated solar power is absolutely the way forward for the Southwest and other desert regions of the US that have 250-300 sunny days per year. There's plenty of land available, no scary chemicals are needed anywhere in the process, and the power output will naturally match the air conditioning power demand.
However, it won't work so well in more moderate climates - you can't concentrate sunlight on cloudy days at all, and a few straight cloudy days are all it will take to use up all of that latent heat in a molten salt tower. It might still be worth installing but you'll have to have standby capacity (perhaps in the form of natural gas generators) to match it and that unfortunately drives up the price.
Also, apparently a number of these plants are being built to use fresh water to help reject turbine waste heat, and that's unsustainable in the sort of desert environments where these plants make sense.