SMES is currently used for short duration energy storage. Therefore, SMES is most commonly devoted to improving power quality. If SMES were to be used for utilities it would be a diurnal storage device, charged from base load power at night and meeting peak loads during the day. Superconducting magnetic energy storage technical challenges are yet to be solved for it to become practical. Thermal In Denmark the direct storage of electricity is perceived as too expensive for very large scale usage, albeit significant usage is made of existing Norwegian Hydro. Instead, the use of existing hot water storage tanks connected to district heating schemes, heated by either electrode boilers or heat pumps, is seen as a preferable approach. The stored heat is then transmitted to dwellings using district heating pipes. Molten salt is used to store heat collected by a solar power tower so that it can be used to generate electricity in bad weather or at night. Building heating and cooling systems can be controlled to store thermal energy in either the building's mass or dedicated thermal storage tanks. This thermal storage can provide load-shifting or even more complex ancillary services by increasing power consumption (charging the storage) during off-peak times and lowering power consumption (discharging the storage) during higher-priced peak times. For example, off-peak electricity can be used to make ice from water, and the ice can be stored. The stored ice can be used to cool the air in a large building which would have normally used electric AC, thereby shifting the electric load to off-peak hours. On other systems stored ice is used to cool the intake air of a gas turbine generator, thus increasing the on-peak generation capacity and the on-peak efficiency. A pumped-heat electricity storage system uses a highly reversible heat engine/heat pump to pump heat between two storage vessels, heating one and cooling the other. The UK-based engineering company Isentropic that is developing the system claims a potential electricity-in to electricity-out round-trip efficiency of 72–80%. A Carnot battery is a type of energy storage systems that stores electricity in heat storage and converts the stored heat back to electricity via thermodynamics cycles. This concept has been investigated and developed by many research projects recently. One of the advantage of this type of system is that the cost at large-scale and long-duration of thermal storage could be much lower than other storage technologies.