News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to store power in molten salt. Parent comment

Re:Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to stor... by Retric on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @10:51PM (#18722368)
Those are horrifically expensive relative to PV and largely abandoned tech. A core issue is you can’t concentrate sunlight on a cloudy day making them even less dependable than PV. The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility even reverts to natural gas, this is while costing 4x what PV does.

PS: By abandoned the worldwide concentrating solar power installed over the last 20 years is ~1/2 the amount of PV added every month.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to stor... by jacquesm on Wednesday December 19, 2018 @11:30PM (#18722522)
Spot on. I made a whole bunch of Solar Concentrator models and did a number of calculations on them. The work was probably flawed for very precise budgeting but order of magnitude should have been correct and even then it would not work, not even close.

The best I found was a moveable array of mirrors and stationary collectors but this too is fragile and a maintenance headache. Leaks of working fluid and mechanical problems would ruin the economics even if you could get the basics to work out in your favor.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to stor... by 7e on Thursday December 20, 2018 @02:42AM (#18723144)
There are plenty of CSP projects underway. See https://solarpaces.nrel.gov/by-status.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to stor... by Retric on Thursday December 20, 2018 @07:58AM (#18724510)
The list is ~25 locations even including 14MW power plants. Like: https://solarpaces.nrel.gov/dadri-iscc-plant but mostly it’s 50Mw. And that’s not what’s coming online this month or something they can take years to build.

By comparison 95,000+ MW of PV is installed every year. And PV has a much higher capacity factor so actual MW per year is even further in PV’s favor.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Alphabet spinoff Malta raises $26M for technology to stor... by tk75x on Thursday December 20, 2018 @03:02PM (#18728587)
It seems to still be a viable solution in countries with a high percentage of sunny days throughout the year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Morocco

[ Parent | on HN ]