heliostat

That's a heliostat system, not a solar panel system.

The heliostat follows the sun mechanically and also can tune in the focus with a vacuum system.

But when talking about rooftop solar, heliostat installations, CO2 scrubbing, planting trees it's all "cost cost cost".

There is a looming water crisis that I think heliostat molten salt could help alleviate by using it for desalination.

Any modern heliostat CSP system would use computer guidance, based on the predictable trajectory of the sun.

I've been thinking about economical carbon sequestration uses for the heliostat molten salt reactors.

A reasonable guess would be that their key innovation is actually just lowering the cost of the heliostat system with more complicated software.

You can do a pretty nifty heliostat with passive heat collectors and a closed loop containing a fluid which vaporizes at a convenient temperature for shifting the center of gravity.

Open loop means that they’re just using a mathematical prediction of where to point the mirror at a specific time, given the relative position between the heliostat, the target and the sun.

My design will already have to use a heliostat to collect sunshine for daylighting, so it makes sense to use a cold mirror to take advantage of the infrared too while I'm at it, it's not much more of an investment.

The cost of solar array as a function of desired temperature risesIn a heliostat-based configuration, I'd assume that it's just the cost of the target of the array of mirrors that increases, right?

Traditional heliostats do exactly what you suggest, but it takes a lot of expensive installation, calibration, stiff mechanical structures, precision motors, etc. to make the real world behave like the math.

Concentrating solar power was a promising alternative; it uses the same steam engines used by coal and nuclear power plants, so at scale it should be just as cheap as they are, as long as you can get the cost of the heliostats under control somehow and scale up.

We have a lot to learn about panel placement and permits, maybe we need to deliberately add jitter to panel orientation in locations where the reflection beam would pass over sensitive locations like high speed roads or even go back to heliostat installations there.