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CA's First Molten Salt Energy Plant Approved
An anonymous reader writes "This year we've seen molten salt power plants start to pick up steam around the world, and now the technology is heating up stateside — California just approved its first molten salt energy plant. Designed by SolarReserve, the plant uses heliostats to focus thermal energy on a power tower filled with salt, which is able to reach very high temperatures (over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit) and can hold heat for an extraordinary length of time. Heat from this reserve of molten salt can then be pumped through a steam generator to provide on-demand energy long after the sun has set."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert
Only if you ignore Solar II that ran from 1996 to 1999....
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
I've been doing some research into renewable energy in an Australian context at the University of Newcastle. The most commonly thrown around figure is 1C/day of loss at operating temperatures.
In doing some simple simulations (using real world demand, wind farm output and direct solar irradiance data) I've found that 50GW of wind farms (peak, scaled by 50x from Australia's current ~1GW peak wind capacity) and ~42GW of concentrated solar thermal (roughly 53x53km square area, spread across Australia on 12 sites) with 24hrs of storage is able to supply all of Australia's current electricity demand. The thermal storage dropped to ~10% capacity at it's lowest point.
The simulation tried to closely model the Beyond Zero Emissions Zero Carbon Australia 2020 plan. Their modeling uses a different demand profile, one scaled to a proposed 2020 level after compensating for growth, electrification of cars etc.
I tell ya, if I had a NaCl for every pun on here...
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.