High on a hill was a lonely sunflower. Not a normal sunflower, mind you; that would hardly be very notable. This sunflower is a solar sunflower that combines both photovoltaic solar power and concentrated solar thermal power in one neat, aesthetic package that has a massive total efficiency of around 80 percent.
Don't they know you can just make popcorn with it.
Where the hell do they get the '5000 suns' part? That's completely pants-on-head stupid. We have only one star with enough relative luminosity to generate significant power. Hell - even the ONE PICTURE where we get stats, it rates the array at a concentration of 2.000 suns - that's exactly twice the normal light of the sun. I don't even know if we had the material and space to do a light concentration of 5000 suns - that's about 6805 kW per square meter. Really fucking hot. Hell - things would probably start getting impossibly hot just at 5 suns-luminosity. Overall, the technology in this article is nothing spectacular - it's pretty much, as far as I can gather, a really fancy solar array that can make hot water. I'm disappointed - I somewhat hoped for