Port Augusta’s new solar tower power project: Clever engineering, but is it a decade too late?

Australia’s grid is changing fast. Rooftop solar is everywhere. Utility solar keeps adding gigawatts. Batteries are showing up at a scale that was hard to imagine a few years ago.

In that context, Vast’s VS1 concentrating solar project (CSP) at Port Augusta proposes a different answer for evening electricity, one that was tried in other parts of the world in the past and is rarely built today...