re: #297 Decatur Deb

In the 60s the French built a vast parabolic mirror array to focus sunlight across a valley, a mile or two away. The purpose was to generate a couple thousand degrees in a target structure, providing a chemical-free heat for high-temp research. Some where near Grenoble, IIRC. Will check.

It’s actually quite a good way of doing solar power. There are test installations in Spain IIRC that use this method: they have “trenches” of mirrors that focus sunlight onto tubes carrying some kind of oil (the tubes are suspended above the trenches). Then the oil is fed into a steam turbine.

I think there might be a test installation somewhere in the south west as well.

Probably just about to lose any funding they might have had, if so. /cynic