Steam pipes through brine pools to generate electricity

Factual Questions
1

I read about this somewhere, but I don’t remember the details or the name. I want to learn more because it sounds cool. Here’s what I remember.

  1. Go somewhere hot (I think the work I read about was done in Israel.)

  2. Make a big pool of brine outside. This raises the boiling point of the water.

  3. Run pipes through the pools to a turbine and back (maybe via a condensing/cooling thingy too.)

The bottom of the pools get really hot from the sun; it’s hot enough to boil the water in the pipes.

My question is this: what the heck is this called? I want to learn more about it, such as whether it actually works or not, but my feeble google attempts failed. Any other information about this is also appreciated, but I mostly just want a jumpstart so that I can read some more about this.

2

Why use the brine at all? Why not just focus the sun right on the pipes? There are already some solar projects that work in this fashion.

3

Is this what your were talking about?

The idea being that since the salt increases with depth the heat will “migrate” down to the bottom of the pond and hod the thermal energy longer than your garden variety water pond. I’m not sure about that.

You could then use the difference in temperatures between the bottom of the brine pool and elsewhere to drive a generator.

4

They say:

So no, I don’t think this was it. I’m pretty sure they had steam pipes. Granted I may have just misread whatever that old article was that I remember.

I’m not sure which would be cheaper. With the pools you have the heat capacity of the water to your advantage. If the sun goes behind the clouds it’ll still be hot for a while. Do you have a link to a large setup that uses this method? It sounds interesting.

5

This explains all about it. The brine basically splits in three layers - the bottom one with most of the salt, which being opaque, absorbs most of the heat, which conducts to the pipe.