Heat Storage
Heat storage allows a solar thermal plant to produce electricity at night and on overcast days. This allows the use of solar power for baseload generation as well as peak power generation, with the potential of displacing both coal- and natural gas-fired power plants. Additionally, the utilization of the generator is higher which reduces cost.
Heat is transferred to a thermal storage medium in an insulated reservoir during the day, and withdrawn for power generation at night. Thermal storage media include pressurized steam, concrete, a variety of phase change materials, and molten salts such as calcium, sodium and potassium nitrate.
Read more about this topic: Solar Thermal Energy
Famous quotes containing the words heat and/or storage:
“And suddenly, to be dying
Is not a little or mean or cheap thing,
Only wearying, the heat unbearable ...”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)