Several companies have pulled their IPOs over the past year, including solar thermal power plant builder BrightSource Energy.
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It builds biomass power plants, huge wind turbines for offshore wind farms and, as of today, concentrated solar thermal power plants.
Google has invested directly in renewable energy projects, such as the 370-megawatt Ivanpah solar thermal power plant now under construction in California.
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The Ivanpah solar tower, formally known as the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, is the largest solar thermal power facility currently under construction.
Solar thermal power is low tech, extremely low cost to manufacture, install and use, and requires very little to no maintenance at all.
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Solar thermal power, which is the most economical form of solar power production, additionally consumes at least double the water of conventional power plants.
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Solar thermal power, however, is not currently cheaper to produce than coal, but numerous start-ups around the world are trying to reduce solar's cost.
Google said its "Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal" initiative will focus initially on solar thermal power, wind power technologies, geothermal systems and other technologies.
Now salt is back on the table as states such as California green-light big solar thermal power projects to meet ambitious renewable energy mandates.
Underscoring the importance of such federal assistance, a partnership NRG struck with eSolar to build a series of solar thermal power plants fell apart when the Pasadena, Calif.
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It is developing giant off-shore wind turbines, biomass power plants (including projects in Florida and Washington with Duke Energy), and, with its Ausra acquisition, solar thermal power plants.
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BrightSource was founded in 2004 by American-Israeli pioneer Arnold Goldman, whose Luz International built nine solar thermal power plants in the Mojave Desert in the 1980s and 1990s.
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The solar thermal power plant business is all about big: Square miles of mirrors in the desert that surround 600-foot-tall towers to generate massive megawatts of electricity for multibillion- dollar price tags.
Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) said its "Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal" initiative will focus initially on solar thermal power, wind power technologies, geothermal systems and other technologies.
Solar One, which went online in June, is the first solar thermal power plant built in 16 years and produces 64 megawatts of electricity during the peak midday hours, enough to power 14, 000 Nevada homes.
NextEra Energy Chief Executive Lewis Hay told me last week over breakfast that he had higher hopes for solar photovoltaic (PV) power than for solar thermal power because the prices of solar PV panels were falling so extraordinarily fast.
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Tellingly, about two-thirds of bids for solar energy contracts last year (by electricity generated) were for photovoltaic projects and only a third were for solar thermal power plants, which deploy vast arrays of mirrors to heat liquids and produce steam to drive an electricity-generating turbine.
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The EIA estimates onshore wind power will be 80% more expensive than conventional natural gas power, offshore wind power will be 142% more expensive than natural gas, solar thermal power will be 208% more expensive than natural gas, and solar photovoltaic will be 377% more expensive than natural gas.
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He dreams of building gigawatt-size plants, of shipping solar thermal power to the cloudy Northeast and of using molten salt to store energy so thermal plants can power homes at night. (Nevada Solar One is only for daytime peak loads.) He envisions mirrors in space that can soak up sunlight 24 hours a day.
The biggest solar thermal plant ever built is in the Mojave Desert of California and generates 80 megawatts. (The biggest single photovoltaic installation produces 12 megawatts.) Solar thermal power prices range from 11 cents to 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, making it more expensive than natural gas generation at its lowest price, around 7 cents, but less expensive during peak hours.
"Our potential in thermal solar power is four times the world's energy consumption, so you can have all the ambitions you want with that, " Tewfik Hasni, managing director of New Energy Algeria, or NEAL, a company created by the Algerian government in 2002 to develop renewable energy, told the Associated Press last year.
While offshore wind installations are very costly to build and maintain, second only to solar thermal, all wind power is expensive.
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The most promising initiatives near term, he thinks, include solar thermal, high-altitude wind power and deep drilling to tap geothermal power.
They argue solar thermal (also called concentrating solar power, or CSP) is getting cheaper fast, too, because of new, more efficient technologies.
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Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive of the French nuclear giant Areva, hinted last week during a meeting in Forbes offices that Areva is developing a hybrid solar power plant concept that combines a solar thermal system with solar photovoltaic (PV) panels.
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The solar mission in its first phase focused on areas already connected to the grid and had a pricing system that bundled four units of thermal electricity with one unit of solar-based power, which reduced the average per-unit cost of solar electricity.
In general, the solar thermal has greater flexibility when used with co-generation systems, such as combining production of power and thermal for desalination or absorption cooling.
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Then there is one of the oldest ways of getting power out from the sun: solar "thermal" installations, which absorb the sun's energy, transforming it into heat so it can boil water and run a turbine.
Utility-scale concentrating solar power (CSP) systems that produce electricity using lenses or mirrors to focus radiation on thermal collectors or photovoltaic cells draw criticism from environmental groups for taking up too much desert land, thus displacing certain animal and reptile species.
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