BUILDING ULTRA CHEAP ENERGY STORAGE FOR SOLAR PV

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Standard Thermal is a company that aims to make energy from solar PV available at all times at a price that is competitive with US natural gas. The company's technology works by storing energy as heat in large piles of dirt. Electric heating elements embedded in the dirt convert electricity to heat, and pipes carrying fluid remove the heat to supply customers. The capital cost is comparable to natural gas storage at less than $0.10 per kilowatt-hour thermal and a thousand times cheaper than batteries. Standard Thermal's system can provide hundreds of megawatts of thermal demand as long as land is available.