"Heat Is Much Easier to Store than Electricity": Dreaming of a Low-carbon Economy

You must read this article if it's the only thing you do this year! It gives the reader a little bit of everything (science, history, economics, politics, etc.) with respect to solar electric thermal or concentrated solar power (CSP). I've written about this with respect to Abengoa Solar's CSP plant in the Arizona desert, here and here. Basically, there are a bunch of mirrors in a sunny place concentrating the solar rays on a tube of liquid. This liquid boils, turns into steam, and then rotates a turbine, which produces an electric current. Pretty simple eh?

From the article, one line in particular caught my eye:

"Heat is much easier to store than electricity, a fact that gives CSP a crucial -- maybe the crucial -- advantage over wind and solar photovoltaics."

That is critical. In order to take advantage of the electricity from wind and photovoltaics at night we would have to store it in batteries, which is expensive. Storing the heat generated from the CSP plant is easier and cheaper to do than storing electricity.

So whadda ya' says folks? Concentrated solar power plants all over the southwest? It'll be cheaper and quicker than building a nuclear plant. It's a no-brainer to me.