A new solar power plant is coming to Nevada and the project will use two unlikely sources, the sun and salt, to create green energy in a brand new way. On not-so-sunny days, Las Vegas could only wish for some way to bottle up the sun and save it for a day in the future. And therein lays the challenges with solar energy. Enter SolarReserve, a California-based company that says it has the answer: technology that uses salt to store the sun’s energy. And it is making its debut in the form of a solar plant just outside of Tonopah, Nevada. NV Energy’s Director of Renewable Energy Procurement David Hicks explains why salt is one of solar power’s key ingredients. ‘It can store heat and it could store it efficiently. And by efficiently I mean the retention of the heat is for a long period of time. So once you heat that salt up, it loses that heat content on a very slow basis. It doesn’t lose it quickly so it allows you time to shift that energy.’ So even on a not-so-sunny day, Hicks confirms that the technology will still work. ‘When a […]