It seems like an huge advantage to use an 80% thermal setup vs a 22% efficient panel, but we gave up on solar power towers for a bunch of reasons. With PV things are a lot more straightforward because you can reach nearly any temperature at equal efficiency.
If we are talking primarily about storage, what are the advantages of a PV field + 1400 C brick storage vs parabolic + 500C storage?
The goal isn’t thermal storage the goal is to do something that needs extreme temperature.
You can’t melt steel at 500C, you can melt it in bricks at 1500C that then cool to 1400C. Use electricity to heat a brick to 1500C and you get 100C worth of energy storage. Use solar thermal to get to 1400C and you get zero energy storage.
Grandparent:
> These are unique it seems because they're durable electric heating elements that can hit industrial process temperatures and might be cheaper then alternatives?
Storage usually makes less sense, but depends on capital cost per kW-hr right? No idea on the economics of that, but an electric heater can get hotter than solar thermal and use much less space at the point of use.
They are durable electric heating elements that can get hotter than solar thermal and hit industrial temperatures without using fossil fuels to heat locally with fire.
IF you just want to go electricity>heat>electricity Industrial Arc furnaces can go to 2000 C (and much higher but they have no industrial need).
I would love to be wrong.
I think the idea here is to go electricity->heat-storage->heat-usage, using the heat storage to take advantage of cheap renewables that might be otherwise curtailed and to buffer the heat to provide reliability for whatever process it is used for.
Almost any form of energy storage other than heat (i.e. batteries, hydrogen, gravity) would be far more expensive in that use case. By comparison, bricks are an incredibly cheap way to store heat.
If packaged correctly this could also be useful for uses like ovens at industrial bakeries, which have highly predictable energy use patterns.
