Molten salt storage container reported to have burst at Noor III solar plant

What happened

Recharge News reported that a container holding superheated salt used to store energy burst at the Noor III solar power facility in Morocco. The report said the leak caused an outage lasting until November and would cost the owner $47 million. The date of the leak, the cause, and whether anyone was injured were not reported in the material available to the register.

Contributing factors

Not reported.

Lessons learned

1. High-temperature salt storage vessels need inspection and leak detection suited to long outages.
2. Operators of thermal storage plants should plan for extended loss of the storage system.
3. Financial exposure from a storage-fluid release should be estimated before an event, not only after one.

Source

Recharge (rechargenews.com)