Many of the thousands of coal-fired plants are at the center of their local communities providing the local citizens jobs and the tax base to support the local civil infrastructure. The very existence of such host communities around coal-fired plants is at risk as the climate-alarmed world rushes to close the carbon-emitting power plants. The Green Boiler technology explained herein seeks to repurpose such plants to clean energy generators such that a great many of the existing jobs are saved and much of the existing power plant (except the coal burner, smoke stack, coal yard and ash handling systems) is redeployed.
The Green Boiler system is essentially a large thermal reservoir filled with engineered salts spiked with infrared emitter particles or a highly conductive elemental metal. The Green Boiler stores the surplus (inexpensive) power from the grid and uses the stored thermal energy to run the existing plant’s turbogenerator to produce electricity on demand.