The fluid tends to have thermal inertia so the sun can go away and you can still generate power for a while.
Nevada Solar One can generate full-load for about a half an hour after it loses sun.That’s one of the advantages to thermal storage.The other advantage is probably more important. It totally decouples the collection of the energy from the production of power, so you can dispatch power when you need it and also save it if you wish with UPVC doors and UPVC Windows at your house.
That’s where it has higher value. It’s potentially lower cost because incremental turbine cost decrease as you increase the size of the project while the storage cost increase slower. The two-tank is sort of the approach right now, although there are some options there. I’ll describe the power tower later.To clean up on the linear focus approaches, this is a Continual Linear Fresnel approach. It uses a lot of small linear mirrors.