RayGen has officially launched its first commercial concentrated PV and thermal storage project following the successful commissioning of a 4 MW solar plant backed by 2.8 MW/50 MWh of long-duration storage at Carwarp in Victoria’s northwest.

The chief operating officer at AGL which is developing a similar solar-plus-thermal storage plant with RayGen at the former coal-fired Liddell power station site in New South Wales, said the technology provides a possible solution to the challenge of long-duration energy storage particularly given its potential to be scaled.

“This innovative approach to long-duration energy storage using concentrated PV and thermal hydro storage greatly improves the efficiency and economics of solar plus storage, providing a potential solution for long duration energy storage,” he said, adding “the technology has the potential to be deployed at greater scale.”

Fortunately for Australia, the innovation in technology is finding ever more efficient ways of providing our energy need.

the technology provides a possible solution to the challenge of long-duration energy storage
WTF? - Not Again,
Let's hope they're right. Did they disclose their carbon foot print size for this development & construction ?
My uneducated guess is that it'd be ten times greater than had they kept burning coal.
As I said it would be great if they were as successful as they portray it all.
btw, is hopefully on par with possibly ?

Thanks, WTF

There's no limit to the amount of the Sun's energy that is reaching the Earth, its only a matter of investing in the developing technology to harness that energy for useful work. The renewable's technology is moving ahead in leaps and bounds, whilst the finite fossil fuels are becoming very much redundant. The big energy companies like AGL are proving that with their investment in renewable's. This is something the crusty old men of the forum can't understand.

The project cost was around $27million which as always with these things, DOESN'T include the costs of linking the project to the grid. Quite a lot for private investors to cough up. I wonder where the money came from.

Oh lookie here....$15 million came from ARENA which is a round about way of saying it came from the taxpayer. Oh and ARENA (ie the taxpayer) is proposing to chuck in another $10 million. All up ARENA (ie the taxpayer) has given RayGen over $38 million.

Truly it is said that, while so-called renewables may not be all that efficient at generating electricity, it is spectacularly successful at generating taxpayer subsidies.

But that's OK because the government can just duck out the back of parliament house and pluck a few more subsidies off the money tree

Interesting, it can deliver 2.8Mwatts and has a capacity of 50 Mwatt hours.
So it can run for 17 hours. Looks promising.
Such systems however have to cope with 3 or 4 or 5 heavily overcast
days so that would multiply their size.
Probably cheaper than lithium batteries but a lot more losses.

Again, the pollution from setting up & maintain Green energy is still way above that of coal burning.
Just because they can't see smoke coming from chimneys makes the simpledoms think it's clean power !