Australia Reinvents Solar Thermal

Its typical for universities to redo things that have already been done to death. Sure the efficiency is a bit higher, but that’s not the point, Australia had solar thermal with storage 20 years ago, the world had it 40 to 100 years ago.

To say this stuff is new is an insult to public knowledge, but this is exactly the point. “The future” will be solar thermal with molten salt storage, only this type of installation was build and ran in Spain already 30 years ago or so. Several perfectly performing solar thermal installations have been demolished because why? Because you need to keep making fossil fuel sellers rich. The future is a great place to store great ideas, until someone like Elon Musk comes along and does it with his own cash (banks will not help you).

We look for links to an australian solar thermal project published about in 2012 that used NH3 to store heat, splitting it and recombining it, a great way to store energy. It used a similar or the same mirror concentrator as shown in the video. Molten salt storage is nothing new, in 2013 a big plant using it came on line in Spain. Watch out with news from universities, they may just be seeking attention..

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