Any solar experts willing to weigh in on the author's assessment of the current state of solar?
Specifically, were a sodium ion battery commercially available (with similar efficiency to lithium ion batteries) tomorrow, would we be living in the golden age of solar energy?
This is something I'm extremely interested in as a citizen of planet Earth.
Update: I did find that people are using hydrogen as an energy store. http://schatzlab.org/projects/archive/schatz_solar.html
The storage medium for CSP is typically some kind of molten salt mixture (NaNO3, KNO3, Ca(NO3)2) which is then used on a closed circuit of water to power steam turbines. Right now this is limited to large facilities. In practice, CSP can be done on a small modular scale.
Here's an example of CSP at a large scale in Spain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMWIgwvbrcM There are also other places in world where facilities like these exist.
Here's an example of CSP at a smaller scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SsJBobMpAk However, they use glycol (smaller thermal capacity) as a heat transfer medium instead of molten salt.
As for batteries for devices, that wouldn't necessarily equate to a golden age of solar energy because there is still larger issue of how the energy will get to the device and at what cost.