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Ok, so it can produce after the sun has gone down, but wouldn't the inverse be true, too, i.e. it'll take longer for it to reach a heat at which it can start producing in the morning? Anyone who didn't fail physics want to help an ignorant AC out?

I don't think you'd have to heat up all of your thermal mass to start producing energy. If you only need a certain fraction of the thermal mass to produce the amount of energy you need then the rest can be a 'battery' that you charge up during the day when there is extra solar radiation going into your system.

As the plant buffers the energy to use it at night, I'd be inclined to use a 24 hours/day * 5 MW.
Assuming that all the other calculations are correct, this would mean approx 21 years for the payback at 10c/kWh, or 10.5 years at 20c/kWh.

A phrase one guy said back in the 50's, used often by anti-nuclear types, which needs to be retired.

I wish it would hurry up and come true instead.

That's normal. First, it's a prototype. Second, it's Italy. Third, it's Sicily.

The project started something like 20 years ago by the Nobel Prize laureate (physics) Carlo Rubbia. Seven different governments (both right-wing and center-left-wing) made every effort to cripple the project with bad management and bureaucratic issues. At the same time they poured heaps of money to dubious Sicilian consulting organisations. After a while (actually, after being dismissed from the environmental cabinet) Carlo Rubbia got tired of all these problems and flew to Spain where he built in 3 years six or seven similar plants for a tenth of their Italian price.

Could this technology be combined with desalinization, i.e. take salt water, pull the salt out to produce potable water, and use the salt to improve the plant's efficiency?

No, once the plant is charged with working fluid, you don't need to add any more.

What's this Fahrenheit rubbish?

In other words, there's value in the ability to produce energy at a constant rate, rather than in bursts. Because when it's produced in bursts, you will have to find a way to store it, which means a loss in efficiency.

If your natural gas turbine doesn't generate the natural gas, you aren't giving the full story here though. You also need hundreds of miles of carefully sealed pipelines and/or freight infrastructure, you also need the refining and mining infrastructure, and you need to factor in the cost for exploration and developing the mine in the first place, with all the dead ends that implies. Natural gas might be cheap but its often subsidised at source, but hey so what you say, I don't pay it. If you live in Europe and the Russians want to extract a trade agreement or something from you, the cost of that natural gas might suddenly start to fluctuate wildly however.

And thats the full story.

This is the FIRST plant, what it cost is pretty meaningless. You need to ask what it would cost to deploy and run the next 1000 plants. Experience will accumulate, production will be scaled up and competition emerge.

60 years is ok, so long as the EROI is good. Power stations aren't something you're just going to get sick of in 60 years and want to get rid of. Also, for a prototype plant, I'd expect there to be a lot of waste of both manpower and horsepower in building the thing that would get trimmed over time if it was at all profitable to do.

Someone needs to explain me how you can create 5 megawatts with only 30.000 square meters. That would make the plant produce 160 Watts/sq. meter on average.

Theoretical maximum efficiency for any kind of solar plant (on the equator) is less than 200 Watts per square meter (to give you an idea, in southern florida it drops below 150, and this is north of florida). That would make this plant over 120% efficient (at least).

Unless, of course, you know, they're lying and it's like 5 megawatts peak capacity at 12h noon at that optimal day in spring when the sun is directly overhead for its longest period, and only counting the total energy circulating in the plant, not what's actually coming out to the grid, which should be a bit under 2/3rd of that, or, say 3.8 megawatts. And 3, at best, during winter.

Yes, but Solar 2 used molten salt as an overnight storage medium only. This plant uses it as the energy collection medium, and is the first to do that.

Er, I ingested more than 400mg of NaCl on my lunch today.

True, my government's recommendation is to ingest less that 6000mg per day, but it's manufacturers of processed food not renewable energy who threaten that.

Not that these heat storage systems use Sodium Chloride, I think they actually use Nitrates (i.e. fertilizer).

Do you happen to have a source on that? I know that at the moment it's like $1.3 per , but last I heard wind turbines were running $2/watt and up.

So I might believe 5M, but not less than a third of that.

60M for 5MW is 12($15.60) per watt, which is kinda, sorta, acceptable for a test plant. But I'd say costs would have to come down nearly an order of magnitude for this to be truly economical.

I'd also want to know if that 30k m^2 can actually RUN that plant at 5MW all day and night, on average. What sort of capacity factor are we looking at?

Which is why the externalities of pollution need to be accounted for via regulation