Wait, my back of the envelope says you'll need to pull down around 650mb a second to stream 4K. That's uncompressed, sure, but anything in that power of ten isn't feasible.
I can't wait until code is no longer seen as this mechanical and mysterious thing. Stuff like this will no longer need to be explicitly be "Art with Code", instead it can just be "Art made by describing it"
Good on them. In reality, however, fuel from the sun is free and we have unlimited land. Getting the cost down and economies of scale are what everyone is really focussed on.
There is a PHENOMENAL amount of money out in Perth. It may be small, but some of the wealthiest in the world (and the world's wealthiest woman) live there.
Largely due to mining, Australia's average wage is around $70k but our median wage is around $45k. Pretty crazy.
It's a similar atmosphere to Texas oil culture (I hear, anyway). Lots of secessionists saying Western Australia is keeping the country afloat. This is somewhat true (but not entirely), and they tend to forget 20 years ago WA was a shitheap with nothing going for it.
There's some (small) wisdom in there. History shows there is less and less correlation between technology and jobs lost the more an industry relies on creativity.
It won't happen here in Australia. QANTAS, our national airline, has just deployed iPads to every seat as the new iteration of their in flight entertainment
So, them being 'black' isn't really the point. The point is the potential to get steam from water at lower temperatures, in less time.
If you are dealing with A LOT of water (if you were to scale this to power-plant scale), you are dealing with large 'thermal mass'. This means you need a lot of heat over time to raise all the water to a high enough temperature to create electricity.
If you run a power plant, you want flexibility. You want to switch on your power plant fast, and then shut it down when you want, without cost. This lets you speculate on the electricity market, and be more available if there is a sudden spike in electricity demand. If you're dealing with large thermal mass, you don't have this flexibility.
Also lots of advantages of lower cost - not needing heat exchangers etc but I'll leave it there.