Work carried out by Austria's International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), which ran the numbers on industrial-scale energy production using CSP networks in four of the world's solar hotspots, which also included the US southwest and India, suggests an energy system could meet rising energy demand "at no extra cost compared to gas-fired power plants".

"Solar energy systems can satisfy much more of our hunger for electricity, at not much more cost than what we currently have,” says Stefan Pfenninger, who led the study while at IIASA and is now doing research in the UK at Imperial College London's Grantham Institute.

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