Solar Energy Storage - Interesting Challenge and Interesting Solutions
When looking at creating your own energy, energy storage is a big issue. With solar power, you’re only creating power when the sun is shining. With windpower, when the wind is blowing. With hydropower, when the water is running. It’s a basic energy source, energy sink issue (a sink is how you use or store the energy).
To date, most people have been using large banks of batteries for energy storage associated with alternative energy. Batteries are the weak link in the whole system (and the most toxic). They have about 1/5th the life of the solar panels for which they store energy.
Larger power companies are developing larger power storage schemes. The question is, can the individual use some of these energy storage schemes as well? In the picture below, the company SolarReserve uses mirrors to focus the sun on a large stack that converts salt to liquid and then uses the hot liquid to run turbines to generate power. The liquid salt holds the heat for much longer than the conventional steam turbine solar thermal designs.
Melting Salt as An Energy Storage System