On father's day I just happened to be in the vicinity of one of the largest solar power plants in the United States. It is an 8.22 megawatt experiment being conducted by Sun Edison in Alamosa, Colorado. I used the power of father's day to kindly request a 10 minute detour because I have read about the plant and wanted to see it with my own eyes.
What struck me first was the fact that I could drive within 10 feet of a power plant. My expectation was to be harassed by some disgruntled guard after pushing some little doorbell-like button miles away from the actual facility. Nope, it was right there next to the road a mere 10 feet outside of my car window with not a person in sight, which was when the second thought came to mind.
As far as I could tell nobody was working there. To be clear I am sure there was at least one person there somewhere but overall it looked there would be better chance of being abducted by aliens in the desert than finding somebody who worked there. I learned later that much of the facility can be remote controlled from a location in Germany and in general there isn't much to do when running a solar power plant.
The night before I stayed in a hotel that was located close to train tracks which didn't seem like a big deal but about two times an hour a coal train woke me up. Which was when the third thing struck me - I wondered about the logistics involved with running a coal plant: security, endless planning to coordinate coal train deliveries, staff, mechanical upkeep, regulatory paperwork, etc. No offense to the engineers who built the solar plant but besides some complex sun tracking software and some large transformers it didn't look that complex.
The plant is an experiment because it operates three types of solar technologies in parallel within a single site. Monitoring of the single axis tracking array, fixed-mounted array and dual axis tracking arrays will provide valuable data on real world implementation on three different types of large-scale solar. Since price is the Achilles heel of solar determining the most efficient generation method is essential for the wide scale adoption of solar.
Even though solar is still expensive relative to other fuel sources it holds some very distinct advantages. For example solar systems generate their highest levels of energy during the middle of the day which is the same time that very expensive peaking power plants are brought online to handle temporary peak loads. It would take hundreds of billions of dollars to replace generating electricity from oil and coal with large scale solar but when you examine the true costs of using other carbon based fuels to generate it may be that several hundred billion isn't that much. Imagine if your town had two choices: a new coal power plant or a solar field. Which one do you think would have a better shot of getting approved in your city? I would guess that something you can't see, that doesn't make any pollution, that doesn't smell, doesn't make noise or cloud the sky would be the clear winner. In a capitalistic society the market takes in consideration all realizable costs so if your city would choose solar maybe whoever came up with the math that says solar is expensive didn't take all the costs into consideration.