Can the same idea be applied to improve water's efficiency to exchange heat, to make it cool easier? Then you can slap a turbine and have the perfect steam generator.
I work in the solar thermal industry - my company (http://www.sunapse.co) builds software for solar thermal power plants. I can say with some authority that this is legit and VERY promising tech.
the way I read this is that they put black particles that adsorb heat better in the water. That makes this produce some steam fast. I do not see how this would produce more steam than, say, a thin layer of water on top of a thin black-painted sheet that is well-insulated from below (sun heats black sheet; sheet heats water).
How is producing some steam rapidly an improvement?
Seems like in most scenarios you're getting at best 40% energy efficiency in gasoline engines and somewhere between 17% to 40% in steam engines.
Even at 17% efficiency using the sun to generate steam power seems to hold lots of potential. The trick will be to get it working at scale and able to produce a similar level of energy with the same or lower cost as existing technologies. May be a while yet, but it's an exciting time to teach your kids science as this is the kind of stuff that they'll probably see in mass later in life.
The most common ones use thousands of mirrors around a central tower. The sun bounces off the mirrors and focuses at the top of the tower where there is a tank of water. The water is heated, boils, turns to steam, which turns a steam turbine.
Look up BrightSource Ivanpah
