RE: Energy Storage News29 Aug 2018 13:43
This UK money is going via the Clean Technology Fund that is mentioned in this article ( https://www.esi-africa.com/eskom-ditches-csp-project-for-battery-storage-development/ ) in relation to the cancellation of the 1GW concentrated solar power (with its own salt based thermal storage no doube) project at Kiwano.
Concentrated Solar Power projects such as these use mirrors to concentrate the sun's energy onto a tower where usually a salt is used to absorb the power by melting at many hundreds of degrees C. The salt stores the energy when the sun goes down and that heat is then used to generate electrical power during the night.
But here's the kicker that many people forget about - any heat engine needs a source of cold as well as of hot, in order to extract mechanical energy which can then be turned into electrical energy via a dynamo. This source of cold is usually a large river which you may just happen to have lying about. Concentrated solar power plants are often sited in deserts, where rivers are not exactly abundant - hence they have in the past had to use cold nightime air to act as the cold side of the heat engine. Air doesn't have a very large thermal mass so the amount of cold air you need is very large, and the winds are not big enough to bring that much air past your door, so you need to drive great big fans to get the cold air you need, and guess what these all use electrical power.
This is obviously a short summary - but the point is that Concentrated Solar Power looks nice on paper but is not trivial in reality and cannot simply be plonked down wherever you like.
PV panels, and our batteries, can.
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