What is your measure of efficiency? I ask because the cost of sunlight is nominally zero so 10kWh/$0 is a really big number :-).
Note that the article said that as a thermal plant it operates 24/7 by storing heat in a high thermal mass fluid. Another shot at this is
Terraform Industries (https://terraformindustries.com/) which is doing something similar with direct PV -> Fuel (rather than using CSP)
The "magic bean", the "trick", the "secret sauce" here is that there are huge swathes of land that are currently both high sunlight receivers and not used (can't farm them, no one wants to live there, think deserts) That could be used to crank out liquid fuel that has no issue being losslessly transported over long distances and for applications that are unlikely to run on batteries any time soon. Making fuel for those by taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is a double win.
Note that the article said that as a thermal plant it operates 24/7 by storing heat in a high thermal mass fluid. Another shot at this is Terraform Industries (https://terraformindustries.com/) which is doing something similar with direct PV -> Fuel (rather than using CSP)
The "magic bean", the "trick", the "secret sauce" here is that there are huge swathes of land that are currently both high sunlight receivers and not used (can't farm them, no one wants to live there, think deserts) That could be used to crank out liquid fuel that has no issue being losslessly transported over long distances and for applications that are unlikely to run on batteries any time soon. Making fuel for those by taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is a double win.