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I just received this terse question from a reader: “What’s the ROI (return on investment) on solar thermal?”

I responded, hoping to prompt more discussion: “That’s an interesting but impossible question to answer. What is the nature of your interest in the subject, if I may ask?”

I post this brief conversation because it’s indicative of two much larger and incredibly important issues:

1) Computing the ROI for investors in new technologies like these is impossible, as no one can pick the winners from the losers at this point. Personally, I’m betting on solar thermal, and, though many agree, there are far greater minds than mine that don’t see it this way.

2) Not to get too flippant, but what’s the ROI on saving our civilization from destruction? According to Lester Brown, whom the Washington Post calls “one of the world’s most influential thinkers,”

Ice is melting so fast that even climate scientists are scrambling to keep up with the shrinkage of ice sheets and glaciers. The melting of the earth’s largest ice sheets—Greenland and West Antarctica—would raise sea level dramatically. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, it would raise sea level 23 feet. Melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, the most vulnerable portion of the Antarctic ice because of its exposure to both warming air and warming ocean water, would eventually raise sea level 16 feet. Many of the world’s coastal cities would be under water; over 600 million coastal dwellers would be forced to move.

Solar thermal holds the single greatest promise of clean, abundant, inexpensive energy — in the absence of which mankind will be unable to make its way across these next critical 50 years.

I’m sure this latter point was not contemplated in the reader’s question, but some folks may find it worth considering.

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I was disappointed to learn that the gigawatt solar project in Blythe, CA decided to switch from CSP to PV. The issue, at least on the surface, is “bankability,” i.e., maturity of the technology, along with the obvious fact that the price of PV is falling sharply – 30% in 2010 alone. But at a certain point, I’m hoping that someone somewhere sees the awesome potential of CSP and really starts to crank on it.

When that happens, we’ll start to see ideas like Ahura Energy start to come into greater focus, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Solar thermal, of course, comes in many different flavors — some (like Ahura) claiming to have made breakthroughs in cost and/or efficiency.  I’ve met with these people, like the concept as I understand it, but still haven’t been told the details of the secret sauce.

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Last year, Areva, the French energy giant, best known (at least in the US) as a nuclear energy company, bought Ausra, the up-and-coming US-based solar thermal company.  More than a year later, we Americans hear almost nothing about Areva’s work in solar.  In fact, the Wall Street Journal’s article this morning detailing the ouster of Areva CEO Anne Lauvergeon didn’t mention the word “solar” once.

One might suspect the worst: they bought the company only to nullify the threat it represented.

Yet if you Google “Areva” you find dozens of mentions of their accomplishments in solar all over the world.  It’s almost as if some sort of disinformation campaign was being waged.  Any insights?

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My drive up to the Bay Area yesterday included a meeting with Ahura Energy CEO Fareed Sfard in the quaint town of Saratoga.  But what once was originally a sleepy stagecoach stop is now the home to a company that claims to have set the world on fire with a huge breakthrough in renewable energy.

In fact, Ahura’s innovation in the field of concentrated solar power (CSP) promises grid parity (an equivalence in price of electricity with that of coal, the dominant source of electrical energy in the US today) more or less immediately.  The secret sauce?  Proprietary low-cost actuators that track the sun through the sky without the expense of the electric motors and controls that normally go along with this set of technologies, eliminating the major cost components that hold back even our most advanced CSP system designs.  An enormous claim, to be sure.

“I have a saying that goes like this,” I joked with Fareed as we spoke; ”It’s always cheap until you build it,” referring to the fact that, at this moment, most of Ahura’s technology is working only at far smaller scale than that necessary to prove real-world application.

My host smiled and nodded politely, undeterred by my remark, which he certainly could have taken as a cheap shot.  But I wasn’t worried about his taking offense; I had seen though our many previous conversations that he is a man of science, with a gracious bearing.

Further, let’s acknowledge two facts.  Here is:

1) A guy who ran 12 factories of the biggest contract manufacturer in the world (Solectron) which put more products into the market than anyone on the planet over a period of 3 1/2 years. I believe this is particularly relevant, as those were products with complexity and tolerance requirements with 3 or more orders of magnitude more complicated than what Ahura has here — which is “light assembly” (vs. real manufacturing).

and …

2) A bill of materials which truly is incredibly simple and inexpensive.

We’ll see what happens, but I actually am betting he can come up with the goods.

Please let me know if you’d like to learn more.

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But don’t we need to weigh the environmental impact of the project – equivalent to taking 90,000 gas-powered cars off the road, against the plight of a certain number of desert tortoises? It seems ironic that we’re so compassionate towards our reptiles when we don’t seem as adamant in our dealings with coal-fired power plants, the noxious output of which causes the premature death of tens of thousands of human beings every year.

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I had a wonderful chance encounter the other day with Melinda Keller, a professor of engineering at California Polytechnic at the Santa Barbara Summit on Energy Efficiency. It seems that she specializes in CSP (concentrated solar power) – and is tackling what is arguably its thorniest problem: cooling. CSP does best in the desert, but that’s where cooling is the toughest. How efficiently can you cool a fluid by blowing 115-degree air past it?

Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell me the exact nature of her project, as it’s funded with private money by a group that wants to keep the work under wraps at this point. But she asked, “Just ask yourself: What’s cold in the desert?”

How intriguing! “The air at night? Underground?” I probed.

She smiled mysteriously. Looks like I’ll have to wait to get my answer.

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In this segment of the 2GreenEnergy Video Report, I cover concentrated solar power (CSP), aka solar thermal. It appears that one of our clients has made a real breakthrough in lowering costs and improving efficiencies.

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