A dispute going back to 2010 shows how even renewable technologies can be stopped cold in their tracks, by indecision, dispute and lack of investment. History shows us that sometimes the best technology simply doesn’t win. We are talking about the thermal storage technology which rests on exploiting the state change of silicon from solid to liquid form. Effectively this is the old molten salt idea, using one of the most available metals on the planet for a battery, instead of lithium, one of the less easy to mine metals, which is never found in its elemental form. In Australia the original patents for the process came out of work done by Patrick Glynn and Neil Parkinson while working at…