Belial666 wrote:
The proposed plant works as follows;
1) Create lots of solar troughs using silver and glass, both of which Charis has.
2) At the focal line of the solar troughs you have a (preferably ceramic) pipe filled with Tin/Lead alloy for its really low melting point and comparatively high boiling point.
3) The solar troughs start melting the tin/lead alloy once they hit a bit over 200 C in temperature so you now have a liquid that can be moved around, melt a bit more of the alloy and slowly increase the amount pumped into the system in a liquid state. Over the course of a day, the solar troughs can reach very high temperatures, easy exceeding 600 C, with 3000 C being possible (though the latter is ill-advised; the pipes will burst)
4) You store the high-temperature molten tin/lead in an accumulator, like the ones normally used for water. A sufficiently large accumulator with a bit of insulation will take many days or even weeks to fall again below the melting point. That can be used to store the energy with higher energy densities than batteries for much cheaper, easy and simple to produce materials. Of course, you don't let it to cool down over days - you use most of the heat over the day and night in your industrial needs until the mix is low-temperature but still liquid the next day when you send it into the solar troughs to be reheated.
5) You can feed the high-temperature mixture into a boiler to heat water and produce steam without burning fuel. You can feed the mixture into a modified furnance to heat it to 600 C or more, reducing the fuel requirements by 30-40% (or even higher, with a bigger solar plant that gains higher temperatures)
6) Once the proscriptions are lifted and the Rakurai is gone at a later date, upgrading the plant to electricity production is really easy.
This reminds me of chocolate factories. In them chocolate is piped around to the various machinery that makes it into bars, cubes, M&M pellets or whatever.
But once in a while the factories shut down. There's a leak in the piping, a fire, a bomb (Perhaps one of the Temple Loyalists.) goes off, the workers go on strike -- whatever.
Then the chocolate in the piping solidifies.
Chocolate factories are built with each length of pipe fitted with disconnects. If the plant freezes, all the piping it taken down, heated in a big oven, and the chocolate removed.
Can you imagine a few miles of pipe filled with a tin/lead mixture, (i.e. solder) where the solder has solidified.
And, can you imagine the same thing in the pumps, elbows, manifolds. And how do you build things like pressure gauges?
Fossil fuels look better and better.
