No. This is the alternate history of energy. We could have been building primarily molten salt solar plants for the last 40 years. They had similar costs to coal, fuel plants, could be built with no semiconductor manufacturing bottlenecks, provided more consistent base generation than wind, had no fuel dependencies, combustion emissions. Now photovoltaics and battery storage are cheaper, more efficient, don’t require water and cooling, and work with wind as well as solar, and aren’t really bottlenecked by manufacturing.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Energy storage has a dual purpose: it plugs gaps when the wind drops or the sun stops shining, and it allows users to buy cheap off-peak power and use it when they need it.

But there’s growing interest in storing energy in the form of heat – and that’s where the everyday ingredients such as air, salt and bricks come into the picture, because these materials are really good at holding warmth.

Spain has more than a decade of experience using molten salt to store heat to be discharged at sunset to create steam that makes electricity overnight.

Unlike much sought-after electrical battery components, salt is widely dispersed, easily extracted and able to store heat with minimal degradation or toxic by-products.

Beyond that, there remain potential commercial risks arising from the relative novelty of the industry and the varying maturity of different technologies, given that businesses often have expensive, drawn-out investment cycles.

Ultimately, with the pressure on to hold down carbon emissions as fast as possible, heat storage start-ups may lose out if the easiest route appears to be to turn to established technologies.

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