Many of us have seen solar power plants of this type, and making primitive versions of these mirror dishes was the goal for some of us, for example this case...
Some of this stuff would be very easy to copy or modify.
Heat isn’t waste. It’s considered waste in a lot of situations because it’s a byproduct that is sometimes difficult to get rid of, but that doesn’t make it inherently useless.
Otherwise I agree that it’s maybe not the most intuitive type of energy storage but if those large solar-thermal power plants use it to generate power throughout the night there’s gotta be something to it. I imagine it’s also something that scales well because the area grows slower than the volume.
Heat isn’t waste. It’s considered waste in a lot of situations because it’s a byproduct that is sometimes difficult to get rid of, but that doesn’t make it inherently useless.
Otherwise I agree that it’s maybe not the most intuitive type of energy storage but if those large solar-thermal power plants use it to generate power throughout the night there’s gotta be something to it. I imagine it’s also something that scales well because the area grows slower than the volume.