Solar thermal project requires more water than solar PV

Solar PV does not store energy. Solar PV is a power generation method, and one that has no inherent storage capability.

You are promoting a system that adds batteries - a separate storage technology. If you can economically add large batter back up to a utility scale PV array, then why couldn't you do the same with Solar thermal generation? The challenge is not the generation, but the storage. Perhaps a smaller PV system is easier to integrate with available storage technologies, but the world needs utility scale power. We need better storage solutions if solar generation is to replace existing generation for all of the world's electricity needs.

With respect to your comment about 'show (you) one other way to produce electric power that is reliable and sustainable', isn't any kind of solar power generation non-dispatchable and intermittent as it is dependent upon the duration and quality of the solar source?

Finally, not all other sources of power are mechanical generation systems. Fuel cells, for example, are electrochemical.

The basic problem with any solar power technology is that the sun is actually a low density power source. Solar PV installations needs lots of modules, solar thermal requires lots of mirrors and piping. Solar thermal is a central generation only solution that creates steam to power a steam turbine. As we have seen with coal, to efficiently and economically derive electrical power from steam, the higher the steam pressure (supercritical and ultra supercritical steam), the larger the turbine (combined-cycle, many hundreds of MW), and the more constant the operation (base loaded), the better. Higher pressure can drive bigger turbines to drive down cost. Getting high pressures from a low density source like incident solar radiation is much more difficult than with high energy density material like coal.

A further challenge in solar thermal is any make-up water requirements whatsoever. As the world is typically driest where the sun is hottest and most consistent, large quantities of make-up water must typically come from somewhere else. And, that make-up water cannot be typical high salinity ground water from desert locations.

The water requirements for solar PV (e.g. for periodically washing the panels) are a very small fraction of any make-up water requirements for solar thermal. Solar PV can be installed at multiple scales from watt to tens of megawatts. Improvements in basic PV module efficiency, for example, can be extracted across virtually any size installation. When used in distributed generation applications (e.g. rooftop), there are cost savings from bypassed transmission costs. Solar thermal is typically remote, and must bear additional Transmission capacity charges.