this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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Would solar boilers be more efficient than PV?
No, neither will it be cheaper.
People stopped building those some years ago.
(But those incredibly expensive concentrators with a single tower are more efficient. Nobody is building those anymore either.)
I assume not efficient enough to justify cost
Turns out that sunlight is very cheap. You need a lot of efficiency to justify any extra cost.
Plus, you get a lot of lag when heating water with concentrated solar. Overnight your water cools down, so you need time to get it back to boiling temperature before it can generate any power. That lag gets worse during winter and cloudy days
In some ways, that lag is good. You can cheaply replace batteries with just a thermal mass.
But it's not good enough to make up for the cost difference.
The sunlight spent just to get the water up to temperature is also wasted, so the maximum extractable energy per day gets kneecapped
PV panels have very low maintenance needs
They used to be cheaper. Solar is bananas cheap now
Generating electricity by boiling water used to be the cheapest option, but nowadays it's a bottleneck that itself is way more expensive than the alternatives that people actually build.
It only got cheaper with time, though. It's the alternatives (PV, wind, batteries, gas) that improved a crazy amount.
Another thread I read said that photovoltaics have an efficiency of around 45%, while turbines are somewhere in the 40% range. Source: I dunno.
PVs max out around 28%
Turbines are over 90% efficient.
Traditional Rankine cycles with a boiler, a turbine and a condenser have efficiencies lower than 40%, I've never seen one higher than 30%.