Moar pwr, from molten salt

Here is a prototype that I once saw on the discover channel, and now the internet has brought it to me.  It's a solar power plant that has a twist on it.  It takes the energy from the sun (ya ya I know you know) and then it heats a vat of salt until it becomes molten.  You may ask, well that sounds stupid, why do that?  Well here's the deal, power from the sun is intermittent.  The molten salt is used as a capacitor to store the energy that the solar panels collected. The molten salt is passed along to a steam generator to (create steam and) power a turbine.  There you have it, power all day long.

According to SolarReserve the plant would use an array of 15,000, 25 foot-wide, tilting mirrors which would direct sunlight to a solar collector sitting a top a 600 foot tower.  Inside the collector would be molten salt.  The mirrors would heat the salt to over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

From energyboom.com & cnet.com

Image from power-technology.com via energyboom.com

Solar filling station

Here's an interesting design for a filling station.  Posted on ecofriend.org, this solar panel filling station will be able to charge anything from your car to your MP3 player.  They already have a prototype in the works and it was said it could charge 8 cars in one go.

"Designed by Michael Scherer from Brixen, the E-Move Charging Station is equipped with eight mono-crystalline photovoltaic modules, which collectively supply 1.76KWp of solar power . With further refinements, the designers are hoping to generate about 2000KWh of electricity from the panels over the year."

The article doesn't mention how the power is transferred to the car, but I think it'd be cool if it did it through ambient radio wave power. It most likely doesn't though...

Ecofriend.org article