MGA Thermal offers 2 to 3X higher energy storage density, producing steam while concurrently storing additional renewable energy

 https://www.mgathermal.com/news/mga-thermal-achieves-world-first-247-renewable-industrial-steam

"MGA converts intermittent renewable electricity into latent heat storage: more compact footprint/ temperature range, more reliable, energy efficient/ affordable than sensible heat storage... on-demand produces steam during phase change... prototype 12m long, 3m wide, 4m tall stores 5 MWh with 500kW thermal dispatch power, providing continuous superheated steam for 24 hours that can power >270 homes, utilizing 3,700 proprietary Miscibility Gap Alloy blocks... can simultaneously charge and discharge energy"

Simon Derricutt commented: Sounds good, but it's electricity in and steam out by the look of it - a bit harder to input energy while it's being taken out if you use some heated fluid and a heat exchanger, and much less efficient too, and in any case the renewable power from solar and wind comes as electrical energy. Problem really is what you use that steam for. If you use it in a process that simply needs steam or heating, no real extra losses than you'd get if you got the steam some other way, but if you want electricity out instead changing that steam heat into electricity loses about 2/3 of the energy. This does in fact look to be the main use here (if you're powering 270 homes you're almost certainly feeding them electrical power rather than steam heating) so you get back about 1/3 of the energy you put into storage. Fairly clearly, the advertising blurb won't mention that efficiency problem, and doesn't even mention efficiency (which itself says they know it's not something to shout about, and could be even worse than I've estimated here if the steam isn't hot enough). Thus this is the sort of thing that would only be done if there's money from government to subsidise it, likely wouldn't make a profit otherwise.

Related:

Miscibility Gap Alloy (MGA) : The Secret Material That Could Solve the World’s Energy Crisis
https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/miscibility-gap-alloy-mga-renewable-energy-storage/

Joule HiveTM Thermal Battery turns zero-carbon energy into firm industrial heat
https://electrifiedthermal.com/technology/