I think solar and wind could be useful to passively charge an electric generator that can run your house for a day so you don’t have to use the system. You could probably get a month’s worth of power that way.
There is an enormous number of industries that use high temperature process heat. Steel blast furnaces ,cement kilns, glass blowing to name the top three. They all need 1000 to 1800C temps and the process doesn’t care if the hot gasses come from natural gas flames, coal or coke gasification flames or nitrogen heated via solar salts, hot volcanic stones or baked clay bricks. As long as the input gas flow is at 1000C or above.
Solar during the day can drop under 1 cent per kWh or in the industry $10 per megawatt hour. At times it goes negative the ability to take nearly free electricity turn it into 1000+C heat and store it for hours and days is a game changer for process heat industries. Curtailment power is half to one fifth the price of natural gas in a btu to btu basis these heat storage units pay for themselves from day one. Even more so in Europe or Asia where natural gas is three times as expensive as the USA.
Here is two companies not using volcanic ash. The first uses fire bricks the same.kind used in steel blast furnaces today to hold excess exhaust heat and preheat the incoming gas streams.
This company is using carbon bricks and is going to 2000C that’s well above what’s needed for steel making or glass or cement. Silicon wafers need 1800+ not much else does.
https://newatlas.com/energy/antora-carbon-heat-battery/?itm_source=newatlas&itm_medium=article-body
Carbon bricks would hold 1800kwh per meter cube at 2000C to a gas/gas heat exchanger at 1800-1000C them to a small closed cycle gas turbine with the final heat exchanger boiling water at 250F and 15psi such a recuperated closed cycle turbine would be 40% heat to electrons and the low pressure steam would carry the remainder of the waste heat at temps useful for domestic heating, cooking in steam kettles, or if on the coast a small desal unit for residential or condo use. A 4500sqft home uses 3000kWh a month in summer for A.C. Loads mostly the winter use is 500 or less. So 4.1 cubic meters of carbon bricks would hold 7500kwh of heat at 2000C that’s enough for a month of 3000kWh electric net and so much waste heat on the other of 4+ megawatts worth.
That is so much you could cook, heat water, and desal to your hearts content and still be dumping heat to the atmosphere or hydrosphere. If you could get off peak or curtailment power for 2 cents per kWh then your cost of electricity is 5 cents per kWh after running it through your storage they claim 99% eff in and out as heat. With vacuum insulation that’s an achievable number joule heaters are by definition 100% electrons to heat.
The bonus is all that waste heat is “free” and at 250F is perfect for hot water heating,space heating, and desal of seawater. Steam kettles will boil water in bulk and you can brase, poach,slow cook think crockpot/Dutch oven, or steam bake at those temps as well. Finish baking or roasting in a secondary convection oven powered by that cheap 5 cents per kWh. Four cubic meters is 5.2 feet by 5.2 feet by 5.2 feet with insulation a foot or so thick and flow channels for the nitrogen gas probably a 8 foot cube would be the outer dimensions for a months worth of energy for a fairly large house that fits in the back yard my home is this size and the yard is two acres inside the other acreage around it ag exempted. I could fit a 2000 as foot steel building inside my back yard next to the other steel building of similar size that would hold hundreds of megawatts of energy. If you can keep liquid natural gas for 80 days at minus 200+ below zero with vacuum insulation you certainly can keep 2000+ heat for the same or longer it’s all about thermal flux and with radiation barriers and vacuum insulation that flux is minuscule.
That is actually the idea behind these kind of bulk storage things because the power is so variable it is hard to regulate. Send a lot of the power/heat to the bulk storage device instead of trying to regulate it. Then you can draw power out of it later when needed. This is pretty much the ONLY time I agree with “green” power, beyond hydro.