Reply #35: You're forgetting that any kind of solar power only produces for a few hours a day.

[TheWraith]

Plus you've got some bad figures. You can only get, even at theoretical maximum, about 500 megawatts from 4500 acres of Stirling engines. When you figure that this only works for about three to four hours a day around solar noon, it doesn't compare favorably to a 30 acre nuclear facility which produces 2,000 megawatts 24 hours a day.

Furthermore, it's going to take one company twenty years to produce 500 megawatts worth of Stirling engines. And since it's sunlight dependent, you still need to add yet more production capacity to build some kind of supermassive power storage mechanism, to hold the billions of watt-hours that would need to be held over from noon to the later hours.

About your math, you need to increase the number of dishes--and as a result, the cost and space--by a factor of six, plus all the area needed for whatever way we found to store that power, something we can't do right now. So 16,800 square miles, 96 million dishes, and 4.8 trillion dollars. Not including storage costs, displacing any people living in that 16,800 square miles, the economic and environmental cost of that much industrial production, finding sites to place these dishes, etcetera, etcetera.