Stan Meyer's 1981 battery for sunlight: the Multi-Stage Solar Storage System

Stan Meyer patented a battery for sunlight that stored heat, not electricity: US 4,265,224, Multi-Stage Solar Storage System, filed 7 April 1980 and granted 5 May 1981 (23 drawing figures). Concentrated sunlight from his collector lens pours through an aperture into two insulated stores, a high-energy stage on top of a low-energy one, filled with a high-capacity heat-transfer material. Under the capping lens sits a light shutter, which the patent calls "actually an light-switch to control the amount of solar thermal energy to be stored": on long sunny days, when the store is full, it closes. At night, if the store runs low, the backup heater "would be called upon at low peak load times — and, when the rates are lowest." That is the logic of charging an electric car overnight on a cheap rate. Sixteen years later, in Denver, Stan was still calling his technology "a solar device". The patent is on stanslegacy.com.

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

• Stan Meyer lecture · Denver, 1997
• Stan Meyer · US 4,265,224, Multi-Stage Solar Storage System · 1981, Fig. 10
• Stan Meyer · US 4,265,224, Multi-Stage Solar Storage System · 1981, Fig. 8, the light shutter
• Stan Meyer · US 4,265,224, Multi-Stage Solar Storage System · 1981
• Stan Meyer · US 4,265,224, Multi-Stage Solar Storage System · 1981, front page
• Stan Meyer, Multi-Stage Solar Storage System, US 4,265,224 (5 May 1981) — stanslegacy.com
• Stan Meyer, lecture, Denver, 1997, at 50:04 — stanslegacy.com