A new way to get electricity from the sun?

Big Gav at Peak Energy directs us over to this new use of an old technology to make electricity from the sun. That old technology is the Stirling Engine. Unlike the internal combustion engine in your automobile the stirling engine requires heat applied to the outside. Details at the above link. This article in Wired explains how the stirling engine will generate electricity using heat from the sun.
Huge Solar Plants Bloom in Desert

The barren deserts of Southern California are known for relentless sunshine and miles of empty space -- the perfect combination for the world's most ambitious solar-energy projects.

Two Southern California utility companies are planning to develop a pair of sun-powered power plants that they claim will dwarf existing solar facilities and could rival fossil-fuel-driven power plants.

Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric are working with Stirling Energy Systems, a Phoenix startup that has paired a large and efficient solar dish with a 200-year-old Stirling engine design.


Stirling Energy Systems is planning to build two separate solar farms, one with the capacity to generate 500 megawatts of electricity in the Mojave Desert near Victorville, California, for SoCal Edison, and a 300-megawatt plant in the Imperial Valley, near Calexico, California, for SDG&E. The utilities have signed 20-year deals to buy all the juice the farms can turn out, and have options to expand the plants if they are successful.

Much different than other solar installations.

Instead of using panels of photovoltaic cells -- solar power's mainstay technology for decades -- Stirling Energy Systems uses 40-foot-tall curved dishes that focus the sun's energy onto Stirling engines.

The utilities are investing in the project and they are ready to begin.

The first phase of the SoCal Edison project will be to build a 1-megawatt test site using 40 dishes, which should be complete by spring 2007. Construction on the full, 500-megawatt facility is expected to begin in mid-2008, and should take three to four years. Each dish can produce up to 25 kilowatts, and the site will eventually have 20,000 dishes stretching across 4,500 acres of desert.


Stirling plans to begin construction on SDG&E's 300-megawatt project in late 2008, and it should take about two years to install the 12,000 dishes covering about 2,000 acres.