There is actually a Solar Power Generation system were a solar collector uses sunlight to melt salt which then circulates through pipes to a place were it heats up water to boiling and that steam then goes through a turbine thus generating electricity.
However to reach those temperatures a simple panel isn’t enough so what you have is a ton of mirrors over a large area all pointing to a central tower were the salt-melting happens.
Here is an example.
By the way, this stuff actually has benefits over solar such as the ability to generate power at night (basically you don’t extract all the heat of the molten salt during the day and just keep using it to boil water to feed the steam turbine during the night), plus it’s still a bit more efficient than solar panels and like solar panels it’s also improving throught things like using different salts.
Gladaed@feddit.org 2 days ago
(these are solar thermic power plants, their panels are black and usually assisted by mirrors leading to a similar look)
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Image
Solar thermal concentrators, they get so hot they have to use liquid metal.
Gladaed@feddit.org 2 days ago
Parabolic plants also exist w/o a tower of sauron.
nevemsenki@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Didn’t this exact plant go bankrupt due to solar panels being so much more efficient?
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They also function as adequate bird-zappers from what I’ve heard.