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.
60% of all industrial heat used for processes is under 350F the other 40% is above 350F. If there is a energy dense way to store cheap curtailment / off peak power into heat and then get it back out hours or days later this is a huge win for industry the economics alone make sense. Bricks, ash and carbon are literally dirt cheap. Once you have heat your also have cooling it seems counter intuitive but ammonia cycle heat pumps can run in heat sources as low as 130F and produce sub zero temps with that heat in bulk. Think district cooling and refrigerated warehouses. On the small scale I would love to have a few megawatts hours of heat storage in the back acres “fueled” by a half acre of tracking mirrors heating the receiver to 1200C. With that make 1000C steam.drive a turbine for electrons and use the condenser heat at 150F for ammonia cycle cooling, hot water , heat my pool+ hot tub + sauna. I would also.tap off some steam between the HP and LP turbine case at 500F and 100psi or so. That would go to my outdoor kitchen into a steam kettle, steam oven and steam griddle all are commercially available. When I was in the aww service we had to do KP the entire kitchen was steam powered from the huge kettles to the ovens to the griddles all F rpm the base steam plant. A detached garage sized brick tank would hold 50 to 100MWh-th of energy months of use for an individual structure plus accessories.
A half acre would put out 2 megawatts of thermal energy if the whole thing was covered in mirrors. 50% coverage would be realistic due to spacing rotation and tilt needs that’s still a megawatt thermal. Texas gets 220 days of full sun per year at my.location and latitude it averages out to 5 hours per day every day on a yearly basis. There is a giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky that comes out to shower us with its glory every 10 to 14 hours.
Problem is heliostats are over $50 per sq meter of surface area. So 2000 square meter is $100,000 in cost just for the mirrors. With 5 megawatts thermal per day at 30% steam turbine to AC current is 1500kWh per day that’s worth at base load rates $75 per day not worth it, now at peak rates which start at 90 cents per kWh and I have seen $4 this week alone that’s $1350 at 90 cents to $6000 at the peak rates I was seeing on the ERCOT grid this last week.
Now you see why storage makes sense store the energy when it’s cheap and sell like gangbusters when it’s at peak. For this half.acre system I would charge it all day tthen sit on the energy till the following day when the next peak happens size the turbine to put out ten times what the solar input is so you only sell.during the peaks and recharge while selling the prior days energy faster than you are putting in the current days energy. At $1350 a day those mirrors pay for themselves in under a year with a 25+ year lifetime probably need a midlife surface glass.change but the toughglass outer layer above the actual mirror is removable and not all that.expansive it’s the aluminum polished mirror plate that it.