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Salts are a good short term solution, but they deteriorate within a couple of years. Everything I've read about salt-based storage is basically a very short term solution because the salts just cannot be evaporated repeatedly without degradation.
If they can overcome that barrier then imagine what you could do with them. Pipeline transportation might even be feasible to transport that warmth from the desert to more useful places like the west coast. That would literally be a boon for the southwestern states.
Heck, a decent salt medium might even give people a use for their old satellite dishes.
One issue with solar energy ideas like this is the use of tracking. You gain about 25% more useful energy with tracking, based on the daily total and that is basically on the beginning and end of the daylight. Throw some clouds in the mix during those parts of the day and your tracking becomes an expensive solution. They are probably better off using panels that are only adjusted for season changes in the sun position, otherwise they sit in a fixed angle each day, than sinking funds into all these sophisticated sun trackers. Adding needless complexity will only turn this project into a money pit.
I'm not impressed by solar power right now on a large or small(home) scale. The costs are high either way for a complete system and energy storage is only slowly improving (which wiould make integration of many solar plants easier on the grid, which is another story). Maybe I'm just biased, but I'm for nuclear power.
Well if there would be lots of Uranium with zero costs and no toxic waste problem then I would agree, too...
As long as you can not match that requirements, I vote for solar power ;-)
Why not use the vast hot deserts in the west, instead of using dangerous materials ?
Do not mix up PV with thermal solar power though, we are talking thermal solar power / concentrating solar power (CSP) here ...
Huh, salts deteriorate? Nobody said anything about evaporating them...
Liquify (compress) them to store heat. Evaporate (decompress) them to release the heat. You're not evaporating them into air, more likely some other liquid medium. The state differences of the sodium is how you get your hot and cold ends of the loop.
Joined: Sun Sep 23, 2007 1:29 am Posts: 126 Location: Los Angeles, CA
Liquid sodium is so highly reactive there's no way anyone would use it for this purpose, in the quantities needed. They're using sodium and potassium nitrate. It stays in liquid form through the whole cycle, there's no evaporation step.
They only talk about a Stirling engine mounted on the solar collector but I imagine you could also drive the Stirling engine from heat stored in a molten salt tank...
The first thing that stood out was "With advanced industry development and high levels of energy efficiency, concentrated solar power could meet up to 7% of the world’s power needs by 2030 and fully one quarter by 2050." I may be mistaken, but some of the more 'pessimistic' projections on global warming sort of make this sound like a little too late. Many also say the change has to happen sooner than later. I just don't see solar and wind (and the grid) ready to make a large 'fast' shift to delivering a large percentage of power generation.
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