World's First Molten-Salt Solar Plant Opens

An anonymous reader writes "Sicily has just announced the opening of the world's first concentrated solar power (CSP) facility that uses molten salt as a heat collection medium. Since molten salt is able to reach very high temperatures (over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit) and can hold more heat than the synthetic oil used in other CSP plants, the plant is able to continue to produce electricity long after the sun has gone down. The Archimede plant has a capacity of 5 megawatts with a field of 30,000 square meters of mirrors and more than 3 miles of heat collecting piping for the molten salt. The cost for this initial plant was around 60 million Euros."

Comments

Proof of concept?

[T Murphy]

So in other words, they are seeing if this design is worth its salt?

Re:It's really not competitive yet

[thegarbz]

It's far worse than you think. 30,000 sq m of mirrors? 3 miles of pipe? Cost aside for 5MW that is an insane amount of real estate for such little area. Our 10MW natural gas turbine at work is about 4m wide, 8m long and 7m high. Add a Heat Recovery Steam Generator to the other side of it and for a little more space you get another 7MW, and all of that still fits into a typical restaurant car park. So if you had huge amounts of disposable cash this plant would still be useless anywhere near a city, or a town, or an industry. That is a crying shame too since 5MW is so small it is basically only practical for industrial or commercial co-generation.

This seems to smell of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should"