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Originally Posted by clive milne
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The reason molten salts are used is to store thermal energy that enables the power plant to operate 24/7 (ie base load power). There are numerous Molten salt based Solar Thermal plants around the world that are base load power suppliers (Spain, California etc).
Just skimming through Terrajoule's web site, they do claim to supply base load power using a condensing/steam flashing process which only loses about 2% of the original energy stored. They use parabolic reflectors which have been around for some time and so it appears that the novelty in the system is within the thermal storage stages. they dont use molten salts - just water.
It would be interesting to see what sort of scale they operate on, and what sort of "base load" power they actually supply. Very promising nonetheless