The NASA Office of Energy Programs conducted a study of the potential utility of large orbital central power stations as a possible means to help meet our country's demands for electricity. As part of this study JPL was directed to perform a survey of potential terrestrial energy conversion systems for comparison with orbital central power stations.
This report resents a preliminary survey of solar thermal power plants using a distributed network of point focusing dish collectors. Such important characteristics as size, performance, operating temperatures, cost and state-of-the-art of the technology are given. Maximum use of existing literature data was made.