The SMH reports that SolarReserve will be building a 150MW solar thermal power plant in South Australia, following on the commissioning of the world's largest battery storage facility by Tesla in the state and in parallel with Zen Energy’s 1GW solar / storage project - South Australia planning to build the world’s largest thermal solar plant.

Following the success of the world’s largest battery, South Australia is aiming to build the world’s largest thermal solar plant. SolarReserve’s $650 million, 150 megawatt Aurora solar thermal plant has received state development approval. Construction of the facility will begin this year.

Inhabitat has a post on Solarreserve's recent proposal to build a 2GW solar thermal power plant in the Nevada desert - World’s largest thermal solar plant could be coming to Nevada.

The company recently announced it’s hoping to build a 2,000 megawatt facility in Nevada called Sandstone. With a planned 10 towers and more than 100,000 concentrating mirrors, the plant would be the largest of its type anywhere in the world. It would overshadow SolarReserve’s Crescent Dunes plant, currently the largest in the US with 110 megawatts of capacity.

Solar thermal power is struggling to compete with solar PV at this stage of its development cycle but projects still seem to be getting over the line regardless.

ReNew Economy reports that China's Shenhua has signed up for 1GW of solar thermal power projects to be built by US company SolarReserve - World’s biggest coal supplier signs up for 1,000MW of solar thermal power.

Digital Trends has an article on Solar Reserve's Crescent Dunes solar thermal power -project in Nevada - Take a peek inside Nevada's new solar farm that generates power 24/7 with molten salt.

The NYT has a look at interest in using solar thermal power plants to provide dispatchable power complementing the output from the rapidly growing solar PV base - Storehouses for Solar Energy Can Step In When the Sun Goes Down.

Two California companies are planning to deploy the storage technology: SolarReserve, which is building a plant in the Nevada desert scheduled to start up next year, and BrightSource, which plans three plants in California that would begin operating in 2016 and 2017. Together, the four projects will be capable of powering tens of thousand of households throughout a summer evening.

Whether the technology will be widely adopted remains to be seen, but companies like Google, Chevron and Good Energies are investing in it, and the utilities NV Energy and Southern California Edison have signed long-term contracts to buy power from these radically different new power plants.

One crucial role of the plants will be complementing solar panels, which produce electricity directly from sunlight. When the panels ramp down at dusk or on cloudy days, the plants will crank up, drawing on the stored thermal energy.

That job will become more important if photovoltaic panels, which have plunged in price lately, become even cheaper and sprout on millions of rooftops. As the grid starts depending more heavily on solar panels or wind turbines, it will need other energy sources that can step in quickly to balance the system — preferably ones classified as renewable. …

The Energy Department seems to agree: in September it gave SolarReserve a $737 million loan guarantee for its project in Nevada. The plant will generate 110 megawatts at peak and store enough heat to run for eight to 10 hours when the sun is not shining. ...

Technical details of the SolarReserve and BrightSource plants vary slightly, but both will use thousands of computer-operated poster-size mirrors aiming sunlight at a tower that absorbs it as heat.

SolarReserve absorbs the heat in molten salt, which can be used immediately to boil water, generating steam that turns a conventional turbine and generator. Hot salt can also be used to retain the heat for many hours for later use. BrightSource heats water that can be used immediately as steam or to heat salt for storage.

The plants rely on salt because it can store far more heat than water can. But once molten, it must be kept that way or it will freeze to a solid in part of the plant where it will be difficult to melt again. “You’ve made a commitment to those salt molecules," said John Woolard, the chief executive of BrightSource.

The technology is not complicated, but the economics are.

The simplest, least expensive path for solar thermal is to turn the heat into electricity immediately. But the companies are a bit like the farmer who harvests the grain and stores it in a silo rather than shipping it straight to market on the expectation that prices will be higher later. They are betting that in revenue terms, the hour at which the energy is delivered will be more important than the amount generated.

The notion is that widespread adoption of solar panels — whether on rooftops or in giant arrays in the desert — will change the hours at which prices are highest.

Today, electricity prices usually peak in the late afternoon and evening on hot summer days. “Photovoltaic panels will do a pretty good job of chopping that peak" in the late afternoon, said Paul Denholm, a solar specialist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
In other words, the new price peak will be pushed to later in the day, to just before and after sunset, when solar photovoltaic production is small or nonexistent, he and other experts say.

Todd Woody at Forbes has a post on a new, dispatchable solar thermal power plant planned for Nevada - Obama administration grants $737 million for a 24/7 solar power plant

The Obama administration on Thursday offered Santa Monica solar startup SolarReserve a $737 million loan guarantee to build a 110-megawatt solar thermal power plant in Nevada that can generate electricity 24 hours a day.

That’s the holy grail for intermittent sources of carbon-free energy such as solar and wind and the SolarReserve loan guarantee is a sign that the United States Department of Energy is willing to gamble on a technology untested on a commercial scale.
SolarReserve literally was founded by rocket scientists from United Technologies’ Rocketdyne division in 2007 and licenses its molten salt technology.

Like rival BrightSource Energy, SolarReserve will deploy massive arrays of mirrors called heliostats around a very tall tower – in this case, one that tops 640 feet – with a boiler attached. BrightSource’s heliostats focus the sun on a water-filled boiler to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.

SolarReserve fills its boiler with millions of gallons of molten salt. Some 17,500 heliostats heat the salt to 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit. The liquefied salt then generates steam to drive the turbine before returning to the receiver. The salt retains heat that can be released at night or when the sun is not shining to continously to produce power.

“This solar technology is a genuine alternative to baseload coal, nuclear or natural gas burning electricity generation facilities," Kevin Smith, SolarReserve’s chief executive, said in a statement.
The Nevada project, called the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, will be built on federal land in Tonopah, Nev., about 220 miles northwest of Las Vegas. SolarReserve said the molten salt can extend Crescent Dunes’ daily operation by 10 to 12 hours and the project can power 75,000 homes at peak output. Whether the utility that has contracted to buy the Crescent Dunes’ electricity, NV Energy, will want the plant to actually run around the clock depends on how it balances demands placed on the grid.

SolarReserve, which also has a license to build a 150-megawatt solar farm in the Southern California desert, is counting on the ability to provide carbon-free power when the sun isn’t shining as a competitive advantage. Rivals are also offering solar storage – Abengoa’s federally funded Solana solar trough power plant in Arizona, for instance, will feature up to seven hours’ storage.