There is molten salt in the town of Hayden’s future – maybe trout, too – but almost definitely molten salt. The idea of using molten salt energy storage to fill part of the gap in employment and taxes left by the planned closure of the Routt County town’s coal-fired power plant is being planned by the unit’s operator, Xcel Energy, as it seeks to cut its greenhouse gas emissions. The technology was developed for use at concentrating solar power plants, where hundreds of mirrors trained the sun’s rays on a tower to heat the salt, which would later be used to power an electric turbine. “New players are looking at using the grid rather than the sun to heat the salt,” said Mark Mehos, a National Renewable Energy Laboratory researcher. “Then using the hot salt to make steam to turn a turbine.” While it may sound exotic, company executives, local officials and labor leaders say the initiatives being taken at Hayden could be a template for helping transition other coal plant-reliant communities. Coal-fired power plants are closing around Colorado and the United States – where coal-fired generation capacity has dropped by almost a third since 2008 to 223 gigawatts. In Colorado, by 2030 only one coal-fired facility, Xcel’s Comanche 3 unit in Pueblo, is slated to be in operation, as more than 30 units will have closed over 20 years. The state has created an Office of Just Transition to help power plant and mining communities faced with the end of the age of coal, appropriated $15 million to the effort, and developed a Just Transition Action Plan. Source: https://coloradosun.com/2021/10/04/hayden-molten-salt-coal-energy-greenhouse-gas/