Really interested in seeing how it fares in reality, almost sounds too good to be true.
Really interested in seeing how it fares in reality, almost sounds too good to be true.
There are significant trade-offs with this technology.
It's storing heat, so if you need electricity then you eat a lot of efficiency. I think Vernon said ~45% round trip efficiency. Batteries are 90%+.
The storage is at a high temperature (500-600C) which means that you can't use heat-pumps to produce the heat to be stored. This means that you miss out on ~400% energy gains possible from converting electricity to heat.
So the efficiency is pretty low.
That said, solar PV is really cheap and moving large amounts of earth into a pile is also a very much solved problem so in some cases, notably higher latitudes which have very long days and low heat/electricity demand in the summer and the opposite in the winter, it could still be a very good solution.