Arizona Solar Power Plant Will Deliver Power Day and Night

clipped from www.worldofrenewables.com Starwood 1 will showcase two critical future technologies. The first is power storage. Without storage, you will only have power when the sun is shining. And while that can work to a point, it will never power the whole world. We'll still need something to take care of the base-load, and that something, as of right now, is coal. Fortunately, there is a fairly good and relatively inexpensive solution to thermal storage, one which Starwood 1 implements. Starwood 1’s concentrating troughs feed heated liquid in large insulated molten salt tanks at 734 degrees Fahrenheit. When needed, these tanks will release steam, driving turbines at night or during cloudy weather. The second big technology featured in Starwood 1 is concentrated solar power (CSP). CSP has seen commercial deployments since the 1980s, but has failed to dominate the industry.