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Google has abandoned its effort to come up with better flat mirrors and power plant designs for producing electricity from the sun’s heat, but it is releasing its research results so that others could perhaps use it to create commercially viable solutions.
It’s interesting to see what Google thought it could contribute to the field of solar thermal power plant engineering. The company’s research has focused on using smaller engines and light-weight mirrors with better controlling software — along with a tower outfitted with equipment to receive the concentrated sunlight and run a turbine and generator — to produce electricity. It ran into some technical challenges with engineering a suitable power tower before it decided to shelve the research project.
