In the same way you're conflating fission with fusion (I'll support funding for the latter, but not the former) when you advocate 'nuclear', you're also conflating PV with with solar thermal under the very broad heading of 'solar'.

My expectation is that most large solar plants will not be PV.

Good point. But do subsidies, research funds, and general sentiment support that? I primarily see investment in PV - not solar thermal. Got a preference I can look at suggesting you are correct?

No idea about subsidies, research, and gen-pop attitudes around the two.

Solar thermal has a couple of advantages - peak supply extends through into peak demand (around sunset), because it's basically its own storage system - efficiency is around 70% (compared to PVC which is ~ 15%, and is expected to rise very gently - as you noted in another thread). The lack of sensitivity to technology improvements makes it more attractive to investors, which is convenient as it's obviously a larger capex per installation. (I suspect R&D for pvc is higher per, say, unit of technology - though this isn't a big concern in terms of capex per user.)

Either way, most nation states have electricity grids that lend themselves to larger power generation installations, than a totally distributed system (where someone else looks after short term storage and baseload) - plus larger installations (solar thermal) work well in regions where there are disparate climates within the reach of long-haul power cables. (Definitely the case in AU for most major metropolitan areas - there are solar-thermal-favourable sites within a few hundred kilometres of the larger population centres.)

I've just done a pvc vs cst - and the latter's numbers really make a mockery of the anti-solar apologists' estimates on surface area required to provision estimated power requirements.