Storing the Sun: Molten Salt Provides Highly Efficient Thermal Storage

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/story?id=52873

Despite their widespread use, solar technologies suffer the limitation of most renewable technologies: an unpredictable operating profile due to weather variations. However, using the highly efficient properties of molten salt for heat transfer, one technology insulates electricity production from weather volatility and, more importantly, it offers the capability to dispatch electricity as needed without requiring the use of natural gas. This technology is a concentrating solar power (CSP) technology, built around a proprietary central receiver tower and molten salt loop.

Thermal storage is widely regarded as the future for the renewable energy campaign because, unlike many intermittent renewable resources such as wind energy, it offers a "zero-emissions" technology with firm capacity and dispatchability characteristics. The thermal storage system provides an added benefit: allowing the plant to be designed to optimize the electricity load profile to meet specific market needs. A plant can be designed, for instance, to maximize electricity production during a period of peak demand or to continue to produce electricity after the sun goes down.

Figure 1 (left) illustrates how the thermal storage system can be utilized to "shift" electricity production to the peak demand period. Solar energy is collected when the sun begins to shine, but electricity is produced approximately 6 hours later in order to generate electricity during a period of peak demand. The red line represents direct solar irradiation, the solid blue line represents the production curve without storage and the dotted blue line represents the production curve with 6-hr storage.

Technology Description

Thermal storage technology uses a solar "power tower" design, which generates power from sunlight by focusing energy onto a tower-mounted central heat exchanger or receiver.

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Let's build some.

all the naysayers and oil/nuclear shills........

Then when you bring up batteries and such they fall silent.

But I am not hearing about ultra widespread use yet.

Lets hope.

showrooms by 2005:



Lovins, Amoral, "The Road Not Taken," Foreign Affairs, page 83, October 1976

It's easy. Not a problem. (Bold, of course, is mine.)

Note that when the famous dangerous natural gas apologist was talking about molten salts - the only correct statements in his insufferably stupid paper were those where he quoted the inventor of the molten salt nuclear reactor, the great Alvin Weinberg - he used the word fusible.

So one might ask Amoral Lovins where, 30 years and several hundred billions of dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping later, exactly, are all these "neighborhood" solar energy tanks containing fusible salts?

In the last 6 years here in this forum, there have been about a brazillion posts on this subject, each of them presenting it as if it were a new and original idea. The amount of energy consumed by people reading on the internets about how wonderfulicious solar thermal storage tanks are almost certainly exceeds the amount of energy actually stored in these devices since Lovins announced how great they are.

and one of the reason that it isn't being used on a large scale is because pro nuke people like yourself have been fighting tooth and nail against anything except nuclear energy all these years. Then of course the fossil fuels folks have been adding their part too, shit like we have an unlimited supply of coal etc so why do we need this.

What I really want to know though is, why do you feel you have to drop your pants and take a big ol' shit on any thread that has anything to do with solar or wind and the advancements being proposed and/or made. I could care less about your personal vendetta with Amory Lovins nor the convulated reasons you've given to try to convince me and others to believe what you think about him. Man, grow the fuck up and add to the discussion rather than tearing this person a new ass at every turn, at every chance you get. give it up. Personally I would pay to see a discussion between you and he as I have a feeling you would be handed your ass, all, every damn bit of it.

How is tearing into new, or in this case, old technology productive, how does that help us? We gave nuclear energy many years to develop a process to deal with the waste but after all this time and much money spent still nothing has been found that we can say is a safe way to deal with it.

So I will say once again I am against adding anymore nuclear plants under any circumstances until that is dealt with in a way that is viable and safe for the duration of its dangerous radiation.

You have no idea as to what to do with it

why am I not susprised

It bothers me not that a person has a certain thought or belief, what bothers me is that person who can not for whatever reason see that there is often other ways to see things.

I admit that I'm a liberal arts major, but I'm wondering if molten salt could be used for closed-cycle geothermal applications. While admittedly of only marginal help here in the US, I'd always thought that geothermal power generation would be a boon for Central America and some of the Andean countries, particularly the ones with very "hot spots."

I did some casual conversation with someone who had worked on geothermal; he said that it's a surprisingly dirty technology. When steam is piped into hot formation, it brings up a lot of nasty, corrosive, and often toxic mineral deposits. I can't help but wonder if a closed-cycle molten salt system might not be a better way to go about it.

I'll defer to knowledge and experience. If I'm wrong, please let me know.

Plain old water would work just fine and eliminate additional heat transfer stages. You can't run a steam turbine directly with molten salt.

The idea behind the molten salts is for energy storage - they stay hot for hours (or days) as an energy storage medium. When you have a cloudy day, the salts are still hot enough to generate steam. With geothermal, there's no reason to store the energy - it's always available.