Blog post from the Malta team on their graduation from X with their molten salt battery grid energy storage play.
> Malta’s solution is to store electricity as heat in high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid for days, or even weeks, until it’s needed. The key insight behind Malta is that electricity can be stored as heat in high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid for days, or even weeks, until it’s needed.
The key insight is an oft forgotten energy storage fundamental called ‘tautology’.
1 - you can never win
2 - you can only break even on a very cold day << f.n.
3 - it never ever gets that cold
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f.n. >> the maximum efficiency of the work that can be extracted from a heat cycle is dependent on the relative difference between the hot end and the cold end and absolute zero. The closer you can get the cold end to zero relative to the hot, the higher the efficiency. The energy of a heat engine comes from the potential. If everything is equally hot there is no potential energy just as much as if everything is equally cold. If there is a gradient, you can do work.