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A Tower of Molten Salt Will Deliver Solar Power After Sunset (ieee.org)
schwit1 sends this report from IEEE Spectrum: Solar power projects intended to turn solar heat into steam to generate electricity have struggled to compete amid tumbling prices for solar energy from solid-state photovoltaic (PV) panels. But the first commercial-scale implementation of an innovative solar thermal design could turn the tide. Engineered from the ground up to store some of its solar energy, the 110-megawatt plant is nearing completion in the Crescent Dunes near Tonopah, Nev. It aims to simultaneously produce the cheapest solar thermal power and to dispatch that power for up to 10 hours after the setting sun has idled photovoltaics. ... [The system] heats a molten mixture of nitrate salts that can be stored in insulated tanks and withdrawn on demand to run the plant’s steam generators and turbine when electricity is most valuable. ... Eliminating the heat exchange between oil and salts trims energy storage losses from about 7 percent to just 2 percent. The tower also heats its molten salt to 566 degrees C, whereas oil-based plants top out at 400 degrees C.
In TFA they mention that there's a smaller-scale demonstration plant operational right now, so it's not like they're building this plant with no working experience. One would hope that the demonstration plant is operating well enough to have justified the construction of the larger one. In projects like this, scale often works to your economic advantage, so it makes sense to start building these things bigger.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
My cottage is quite close, the project is described at http://ecogeek.org/2013/04/ope...
This approach is low-cost, and used in Brazil among other places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
davecb@spamcop.net
If this company thinks they can operate this plant, I see no reason to stop them.
I see no reason why you keep mentioning birds like it's some sort of game changer. In Canada between 16-42 million birds are killed each year through collisions with buildings. Should we stop building houses? http://www.ace-eco.org/vol8/is... North America wide that number may rise as high at 1 billion. http://www.flap.org/faqs.php Not to mention that you conveniently left out the death toll on all animals from pollution/habitat loss from the fossil fuel generators which far exceeds the numbers of 'streamers' that these plants will generate.
Improvements on all fronts, should not be abandoned because those improvements are not perfect.
They are taking a step towards solving the problem of base load.
Except "base load" is NOT a problem. It may be a problem someday. But it is not a problem today. The problem today is that solar costs three times what it needs to cost to be competitive. Unless that problem is solved, everything else is irrelevant.
Solar is great, but it's not steady.
When it is less than 1% of the supply, it doesn't need to be steady.
The solution to steadiness is smart meters and demand driven pricing, not molten salt.