This is not new, this is a better tech paper than the infomercial at the beginning of the thread:
http://www.climatetechwiki.org/technology/energy_towerfrom 2001:
http://www.transnational-renewables.org/Gregor_Czisch/projekte/new_et-brochure_zaslavsky.pdfthe big issue is return on the investment,...
deserts with large populations of well paid citizens which can afford commercial power rates in close proximity to the producing towers are a limited scenario on the world stage,...
for Israel, one of the significant drawbacks was security,...
towers 3000 feet tall and over a hundred feet in diameter are just too big a target for people who like to blow things up to make a statement,...
same problem for us (USA), the big one envisioned for Arizona will be right on the border with Mexico,...
arguably one of the most porous borders in the Western Hemisphere,...
imagine spending 300 million dollars to build a spectacular monument to clean energy only to have a bunch of psychotics across the Mexican border zero in on it from 3 plus miles away with surplus mortars from the USSR pounding your huge electricity making pipedream into a shamble of rubbled wreckage,...
all this as the bought off Federales take their sweet time getting to the scene of the perpetrators only to report the perps escaped into who knows where (probably with kids in tow, to north of the border, seeking humanitarian asylum),...
I'm just saying, these are very real concerns, the best places for these machines quite often do not have populations with enough disposable income to afford the monthly bill or, they are not in the most secure of locales for such a huge soft target,...
Maybe Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran and places of that ilk,...
Morocco, Israel, Iraq, Libya or within 20 miles of the US-Mexico border!?!?!?
not so much,....