Perhaps the choice was between a 0% efficient energy store that costs $0 (dumping the excess on the floor) versus a 35% efficient store that costs $x. The econ

Perhaps the choice was between a 0% efficient energy store that costs $0 (dumping the excess on the floor) versus a 35% efficient store that costs $x. The economics of wastefulness can get complicated fast. But even so, there are an awful lot of cheap energy storage schemas that are not limited by Carnot efficiency, so it's a bit baffling why anyone would try to play Maxwell's daemon with their storage facility, when they could be dumping energy into reversible chemical reactions, as one would expect inside a chemical battery. Or maybe even a flywheel system. We're getting better at materials science all the time, and we could almost certainly dump lots of energy into flywheels without exploding them. And the article sounds a lot like they aren't just sticking a Stirling engine between a hot well and a cold well and pairing it with a motor/generator. That's about as far as I'd go in the thermal energy storage game.