There are a number of reasons why a smaller dish is so much better, first of all, when a friend of mine an myself went to the Mildura opening we called in to have a look from the road at the Bridgewater facility, we saw the smaller test dishes that Silex had spoken of, they looked impressive, although I was told later at the Mildura opening that they were slightly different to the new dishes that are coming, I was told that the new ones are around half the diameter of the large ones.
A dish half the size first of all would be cheaper to make, it would have a much better wind loading factor, it would need less space on the ground, it would be much lighter, the two axis tracking system would not need to be as big as the one for the larger dish (less weight and smaller wind loading).
Now here comes one of the most important bits, if you made them so they could fold in half, a bit like a giant clam or butterfly wings then you can fit them inside a shipping container just, that means that they can be fully constructed in a purpose built jig, and all of the reflectors can be focused to their correct position wrt to the collector position, the larger dishes have to be partially built on site because they are too large to ship in one piece, that means more man hours in remote locations and a longer time in the field generally, it also means a quicker installation with the smaller dishes.
I once thought that the 1000 sun dish would produce more power than the larger 500 sun dish, but I am not sure about that now? it could be that the smaller dish has a stronger concentrator, the lens that magnifies the suns rays, but because the dish is about half the size, the output may be similar to the larger dish if you get my drift? but with more efficient cells like the new ones coming which they say will be around 50% efficient, which is around a 20% better efficiency than today's cells, the output of the whole dish system would be better you would think, how much more I don't know at this point.
As far as the tracking goes , it has to be extremely accurate, and it is, otherwise the dish system doesn't work.
Hope that helps
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