The dawn of the solar power station

There’s nothing new under the sun. Mankind has been trying to harness solar power for centuries. There are legends of Archimedes defending ancient Greek cities by focusing the sun’s rays onto enemy ships. Leonardo da Vinci designed a system to heat water using solar power for renaissance Florence.

But now it seems that solar thermal power might be back, on a large scale. Engineers in Australia, the US and Spain are building plants that use the sun to generate electricity; not by photovoltaic (PV) reactions in semiconductors, but by simply focusing the sun to heat water, like Leonardo planned five centuries ago. And while Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) is likely to face the fierce competition of the commodity energy sector, it might even form part of the electricity supply in overcast Britain, thanks to an ambitious plan to ’sell sunlight’ from the sunbaked plains of North Africa into Europe.