I guess there are two parts to an answer to your great question, Matt.

First, the energy market is way too big for any solution to capture it all alone. So in that sense, I do not see other innovations as fundamental threats. At least not as long as costs of solar thermal are sufficiently low.

Second, yes, I believe solar thermal has a leg up on the other solutions; Hydrogen produced from renewable power has low roundtrip efficiency; a kWh power is still factors more expensive than a kWh heat; CCS reduces the efficiency of power plants meaning you need to build more power plants and burn more coal to capture the carbon; biomass is a too limited resource to make a difference in scale; massive installations of new on- and offshore wind turbines, as well as a massive roll-out of nuclear, will likely face massive delays and obstructions from Not-In-My-Backyard opposition; and wave power is, as far as I know, decades from any really scalable solutions. 

This is not to say that I do not expect competition from other solutions. Just to emphasize that all solutions have their challenges to deal with.

Thank you for your comment, Bob. It gives me an opportunity to try to be a bit more precise. 

I do not see solar thermal become the only source of energy. The way we see it in Heliac is that our solution is an add-on to the fossil-fired systems. As long as integration is inexpensive and the heat produced at costs competitive to fossil fuels, this makes sense. This is what we do already today at EON's district heating plant in Denmark, where we deliver ~20% of the annual demand, while the rest is produced with natural gas and biomass. The more inexpensive storage that becomes available, the more solar can be installed, but never 100%. 

Second, comparisons to solar for power production (CSP) is not very relevant. As long as the market price for electricity is higher than for heat, no heat users will use electricity for their heat-driven industrial processes. Also, the storage of electricity is ~20-100X more expensive than storing heat at relatively low temperatures. This makes the case even worse for companies producing 24/7.

Third, solar heat may also be used for pre-heating higher temperature processes (I've included a link to an NREL-analysis of this in my article). If you take the cement factory that needs 2 TWh per year and assume that they need 900C for their production, that solar thermal can pre-heat the limestone to 300C, that this would save them a third of their consumption (I know it's not linear, but just as an illustration), that they are placed in California paying $25/MWh, and the DNI is 2400:

• The solar thermal production would need to be 720 GWh.
• With DNI 2400 this would require a 300 MW solar field. 
• 300 MW = 300 acres (at least for Heliac's solution) = 0.5 sq. mile
• Assuming 25 years lifetime, an opex of $5/MWh, and that the heat is sold to the cement factory by a utility with a wacc of 4%, then the solar field can be sold at $780,000/MW = $234 million.

One major reason for the vast difference in your calculation compared to my calculation is that solar thermal turns ~70% of the energy from the Sun directly to heat. Power production from solar is done at 37.5% efficiency, so per 1000 W of solar irradiance, you get 1000 x 0.7 x 0.375 = 260 W power instead of 700 W of heat. Also, you need to invest in turbines and molten salt storage. 

Finally, there are a few other parameters that can be brought into play. I will discuss these in a follow-up article in a few weeks.

Thanks, Jakob