All renewable energy projects need to be evaluate in the units just presented! Now let imagine scaling this up by a factor of 10 to 640 MW to serve Eugene. What kind of footprint would that have in say a sunny location in Eastern Oregon?
If this facility had a 30 year lifetime, then that 2.7 billion dollar sticker shock is really $90 million dollars a yeaar for 30 years. Oregon already spends about 1 Billion dollars a year on core infrastructure projects so this is a drop in the bucket. Suppose you wanted to put the project cost entirely on Eugene residents. According to EWEB there are about 75,000 residential customers in Eugene. That translates into $1200 per year per residence to build this facility (from which each residence would get "free" electricity during the day time).
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Many commercial systems now use something called a parabolic trough: Here the focus point of the parabolic trough is a receiver pipe. The pipe is filled
with oil (not crude oil) and is heated to about 400 C. This heat energy is then used to
generate electricity in a conventional steam generator. Solar trough farms are now being constructed (at a slow pace) in some locations in the American SW. The 
