this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
172 points (99.4% liked)

Australia

3520 readers
185 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Moderation

Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.

Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] palitu@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am listening to a The Solar Insiders Podcast, which is interviewing the CEO of RayGen (thanks for intoducing it to me, really cool).

the 70% is the efificency of the energy storage, which is similar to pumped hydro. ie, they put in 1MWh to the chiller, and will recover 0.7MWh from the organic rankin cycle turbine.

so, they get the 30% of the solar (or whatever it is), plus the recovery of the heat. They were saying that for 1 tower, they get 1MW of solar and 2MW of heat. but they never said how much of the 2MW of heat gets converted to electricity, or what the efficiency is, but it sounds like they need to consume electricity to use the ORC (ie for the chiller).

one other thing is that they ORCs can provide grid inertia which is a cool outcome too.

[–] Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hi mate, I think you misunderstood me.

It captures 30% of energy as PV and 60% as heat energy. The whole system itself is about 80% efficiency in terms of the energy captured from the sun, not the PV itself.

This makes it more effective than if you somehow had a molten salt and a normal PV plant in superposition on the same site.

[–] palitu@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i haven't been able to find the actual insolation to electricity efficiency anywhere. Do you have a link that shows the incoming energy to output electricity?