[szvsw]

Well like you said the resistive heating is what sets it apart, and still makes it potentially useful as a thermal ESS because of the classic duck curve even if it's not the primary use case. Soak up excess elec during midday as heat in batteries, use TPV to convert IR back to elec during evening peak or outages. Antora (eg) does this with carbon blocks in shipping container sized units. Would be more desirable/flexible to do a setup like that where the TESS is just another prosumer on the electrical grid rather than using parabolic mirrors+firebricks which can't be used for time delaying supply. Can't speak to the pros/cons of this vs carbon block thermal batteries but still a potential avenue.