The Energy Economy continues to heat up--literally--as practical Stirling engines, powered by light, are getting an injection of technology. The Stirling engine was invented two hundred years ago, but it was hard to control, so it was largely a novelty item.
Recent work at Sandia Labs in New Mexico has Stirling engines looking like a useful source of electric power, using sophisticated electronic controllers that manage the output of the engines. Stirling engines have only a few moving parts, and are heated by a reflective dish that looks like an oversized satellite antenna. Sandia is designing a 20,000 dish farm of Stirling engines that would generate 230,000 volts of power for an electric grid, at costs near the average of today's fossil fuel generators. Buried in the article is a nugget indicating that they plan to use hydrogen fuel cells to store power during the day and release it at night, when the Stirling engines are shut down.
Does your region have a strategy to participate in the Energy Economy? Have you done an inventory of your manufacturing companies and entrepreneurs to find out who might already be positioned to grb a piece of the energy business?