Technology that can concentrate the power of the sun, making solar power more efficient and cost effective, looks to be one step closer to reality.

Sunlight has traditionally been harder to capture and convert into electricity very efficiently, because solar power is diffuse: Generating enough solar power with typical photovoltaics requires a four-square-mile area of silicon to get the same amount of electricity as a typical power plant.

But what if the sun’s power could be concentrated so that less material, less space, and less money was needed to power our lives cleanly? Replacing most of the silicon with plastic or glass lenses or metal reflectors would reduce the cost and require an area only about the size of a common backyard. Factor in the smaller amount of semiconductor needed, and soon a utility-scale solar plant would only take up between 2 and 2 1/2-square-miles – about half of what it would be now.

Several companies are rushing to develop the most innovative and efficient solar technology. Japan-based Sharp Corporation has developed a new system for focusing sunlight with a lens like the one used in lighthouses. The lens concentrates the light onto solar cells that are twice as efficient as traditional silicon cells. California-based SolFocus and Energy Innovations have also developed new concentrators, and Boeing subsidiary Spectrolab is supplying over a million solar cells for concentrator projects, including one in Australia that will make enough electricity to power about 3,500 homes.

But the systems are complex and difficult to implement. As Technology Review put it:

The goal is to engineer a concentrating system that focuses sunlight, that tracks the movement of the sun to keep the light on the small solar cell, and that can accommodate the high heat caused by concentrating the sun's power by 500 to700 times–and to make such a system easy to manufacture.

But Michael Rogol, solar industry analyst for the German company Photon Consulting, encourages people to keep their eye on the prize.

The biggest news for me is that serious solar people, over the course of the last year, have made notable commitments to concentrators.