Over in Arizona the 280 megawatt Solana Generating Station, built and owned by Spanish company Abengoa Solar, has gone into commercial operation. Utility Arizona Public Service is buying all of its output, which is enough to power a city of 70,000 homes.
The plant uses the sun's rays to produce its electricity during the day. However, unlike photovoltaic solar systems, this one can keep generating after the sun goes down. Indeed, it continues to produce electricity at full capacity for up to six hours after sunset - including those key early-evening hours when customer demand typically peaks in Arizona, just as it does in Australia.
The plant sits on 7.8 square kilometres of land near Gila Bend, Arizona, and uses concentrated solar power to generate heat energy.
The plant's CSP technology produces electricity by collecting the sun's heat to create steam.
That steam is used to turn conventional turbines.
The process begins with 2700 parabolic trough mirrors that follow the sun to focus its heat on a pipe containing a heat-transfer fluid.
This fluid, a synthetic oil, can reach temperatures of 390C.
The heat-transfer fluid flows to steam boilers, where it heats water to create steam.
That steam drives two 140MW turbines to produce electricity.
In essence, this is similar to a traditional power plant. In place of the solar mirrors and heat-transfer fluid, imagine a coal-fired or natural gas-fired boiler.
Australia had a similar project, albeit at a much smaller scale, that planned to use thermal mirror technology held by a small company called Wizard Power. According to ASIC records, Wizard Power is in administration and with its collapse went the solar project for Whyalla in South Australia.
What that project did not have, however, was the next stage that Solana goes to - the ability to keep turning out the watts when the sun went down.
The heat-transfer fluid is used to heat molten salt in tanks adjacent to the steam boilers.
The thermal energy storage system includes six pairs of hot and cold tanks with a capacity of
125,000 tonnes of salt.
The molten salt is kept at a minimum temperature of 277C.
When the sun goes down, the heat-transfer fluid can be switched to run through the salt tanks instead of the mirrors to keep it hot.
This sort of technology is not cheap, of course.
The total investment in the Solana plant is about $US2 billion ($A2.12m). During financing, Solana received a federal loan guarantee of $US1.45 billion from the US Department of Energy federal Loan Guarantee Program.
This support made the construction of Solana possible.
It also tells the tale of what may have been for Australia.
A few years back, the proponents of the Tropicana gold mine in a very remote corner of Western Australia - on the western edge of the Great Victoria Desert - toyed with the idea of bringing in similar technology to power the mine.
Instead of salt, the plan was to use an ammonia battery. The energy would be used to split the ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen particles. Once the sun went down the energy liberated from the reconnection of those atoms would be used to turn the turbines.
Imagine the possibilities. Instead of having to truck in expensive, environmentally unfriendly diesel fuel, the plant would have been able to run independently using the sun's rays, and in that part of the world, those rays are plentiful.
However, Anglogold Ashanti and its partner Independence Group had been hoping for a federal grant that would have helped offset some of the costs and risks associated with the project.
The government of the day decided to discontinue the grant and the proponents instead plumped for traditional diesel generating sets.
So again, if the Americans and the Spanish can do it, why can't we?
