The Guardian reports that a combination of mirrors to focus the sun's heat and a Stirling engine to drive a generator could be the game changer for solar energy. The Stirling engine works by moving gas between a heated cylinder and a cooled one, or by moving the gas between a heated and a cooled end of a single cylinder. Any source of heat will work. Wikipedia has an article about it here. Stirling Builder is dedicated to the engine, and has some free instructions on how to build one.
The main advantage of Stirling's invention is that it can exploit smaller temperature differences than the steam engine. This means that it can exploit ambient energy more efficiently than a steam engine, which requires higher temperatures to work. Both engines can drive generators to produce electricity. Both are heat engines, which means that the conversion ratio is lower than that of solar cells.
Updated 2026-08-22.
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