At the time the Manzares installation was built the concept seemed very promising. I read about it as a child in an overview of different approaches to solar power generation and to me, the chimney stood out as far more practical than the various mirror setups that were tried at the time (and that remained iconic "future energy" through 90ies and early aughts, e.g. in computer games). But photovoltaics have gotten so much cheaper, all that is left for mirrors, chimneys and the like is nostalgia. Like past futures with flying cars and landline phones.

The chimney idea did have a bit of a revival through the discovery of thermal mass as a way to flatten the day/night cycle, but that's far too short term and undispatchable to really make much of a difference. The gap behind photovoltaic is just too big I think and of we ever have hydrolysers on the scale we need for everything else, adding some more capacity will again win from scale.

These days, even the bad idea of integrating some battery capacity directly on module level would seem more promising to me. So many very good reasons not to do it, biggest one is very different expected service life, but if you do stuff at numbers like photovoltaic modules, scale effects are difficult to predict.

What I want, as a solar future tech fantasy, is installation/service robotics. Central premise: the modules need permanent scaffolding anyways. Focus on that for where innovation happens and make a pair of scaffolding system and machine that are designed for each other so that the scaffolding can serve the machine as as a controlled environment for travel (and power!), and the machine (or family of different machines) can do diagnostics, clean or even replace modules. Bonus points of course if the machine(s) can also lay out more scaffolding, but I'd consider that beyond mvp.