Without trying to give the impression that I am an expert on Stirling engines: don’t get me wrong...if someone can come up with a feasibility for warm fusion using OWB (Oprah Winfree’s Bathwater) I’m all for it. But wrt Stirlings, as you imply, highish power will require a physically large engine because the stroke has to be large and the temp differential has to be large. The examples I’ve seen indeed have the character of “demonstration” devices. All of these alternative methods, from arcane to just unusual, have their place(s): Having solar panels to charge the batts in remote highway emergency phones is fabulous. Generating power by capturing & burning methane on a pig farm is great. But these are not system-wide solutions for much of anything.
Oh, I agree - wholeheartedly.
I’m just injecting a little nit on the subject of Sterlings themselves. The reason why they’ve gotten a bad rap is that efficiency champions and engineers have tried to shove them into cars - and the issues in a Sterling just don’t (IMO) lend themselves to being shoved into a car or truck. They’ll be too big, too heavy, to light in torque if they’re not too big and too heavy, etc. That’s why I’m still a huge champion of diesel engines for autos and trucks.
But in a stationary installation, I think that most of the issues with a Stirling could be sufficiently solved to make them a viable alternative to PV cells in “industrial scale” solar power developments in that PV cells don’t have conversion efficiencies as high as a Stirling can get without getting to the very bleeding edge of PV cell solid state physics using some very rare minerals to dope the silicon. By my estimates, there aren’t enough rare earth minerals to salt the silicon in PV sells to get us anywhere near the power output the greenies want - there’s going to need to be some other solar->power conversion method other than PV’s.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that neither solar, nor wind, provide base-load power. They’re toys on the edge of the grid, so to speak. The calls for 20% of our power to come from “alternative” sources that aren’t base-load power... they’re silly.