We’ve gone round and round on various ways to store energy from intermittent suppliers like solar and wind before …
The always excellent Robert Rapier has this interesting squib on using molten salt to store thermal energy from solar in his R-Squared Energy Blog.*
(While you’re there you should check out his terrific posts on ethanol and biodiesel. He is in the interesting position of being a real advocate who can’t ignore how oversold they are.)
*Engineer “humor” alert: Baby engineers learn Ohm’s law, which (in one form) gives the power of an electric circuit as E = IR^2, where E is the power (Watts), I is current in Amperes, and R^2 is the square of the resistance in Ohms.
So Robert Rapier — whom some might nickname “R Squared” — has a blog about energy that he calls “R-Squared,” with “I-R-Squared” in the domain name.
Engineer humor doesn’t get much better than that. Really.
