What’s the advantage of that solution over existing solutions like heating molten salts?
Efficiency. You’re collecting 70% (potentially 80%) of the available energy. The best PV is below 30% and the best molten salts are 35% max.
I thought molten salt storage gets like 90% efficiency. What’s the advantage of storing energy by cooling blocks?
To run a heat engine you need a temperature difference in order to generate work. When your system generates heat as a byproduct you can amplify the amount of work by increasing the temperature difference. This is how the cold block “stores” energy.
What’s your source on 90% efficiency? Here it’s stated 35% max.
I am listening to a The Solar Insiders Podcast, which is interviewing the CEO of RayGen (thanks for intoducing it to me, really cool).
the 70% is the efificency of the energy storage, which is similar to pumped hydro. ie, they put in 1MWh to the chiller, and will recover 0.7MWh from the organic rankin cycle turbine.
so, they get the 30% of the solar (or whatever it is), plus the recovery of the heat. They were saying that for 1 tower, they get 1MW of solar and 2MW of heat. but they never said how much of the 2MW of heat gets converted to electricity, or what the efficiency is, but it sounds like they need to consume electricity to use the ORC (ie for the chiller).
one other thing is that they ORCs can provide grid inertia which is a cool outcome too.
Hi mate, I think you misunderstood me.
It captures 30% of energy as PV and 60% as heat energy. The whole system itself is about 80% efficiency in terms of the energy captured from the sun, not the PV itself.
This makes it more effective than if you somehow had a molten salt and a normal PV plant in superposition on the same site.
