The Wilson Solar Grill can not only  cook your food when the sun is out during the day, but it can store that heat energy and so you can cook your food at night. How you ask? The solar grill uses a fresnel lens to heat Lithium Nitrate. (Lithium nitrate “is the lithium salt of nitric acid. It is made by reacting lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide with nitric acid.“) ~Wikipedia

It will store the heat energy for up to 25 hours released as a convective heat at temperatures of 450 degrees F. This solar cooker technology MIT professor David Wilson and has great potential for cooking and other uses. Technically, you could store the heat energy and heat your home, your water, and probably generate electricity as well. Heat is after all energy, and energy can be converted to electricity. All you need is heat, and this could provide it.

In the future, these could be commonly used for backyard cooking at home:

This is a concept product. It’s based on real technology and science. The Sun is a powerful source of energy, and capturing that energy with fresnel lenses and storing the heat energy is possible and is already being done.

Please see the reference links below.

Thermal Energy Storage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage

World’s Largest Solar Thermal Plant With Storage Comes Online
Read more at http://cleantechnica.com/2013/10/14/worlds-largest-solar-thermal-plant-storage-comes-online/#DpEGdPFV1T7sOKBt.99

A huge solar farm with molten salt storage is ready to go live in Arizona 

Future use?