/sci/ - Science & Math

People are always whining about photovoltaic cells requiring rare minerals that are environmentally unfriendly to mine and whatever so why aren't we just doing solar energy through the mirror method?
is photovoltaic really more efficient than just heating up some water with the suns heat and running that shit through a turbine, this method just requires some good ol' fucking steel and idk what else
like yeah sure this method isn't usable for smaller applications but it is very much usable for big power plants which ought to make up the majority of solar power production anyhow