How concentrated solar power could fuel the future | Big Think - YouTube

NARRATOR: This might look like a death ray,  

but it's not. It's actually...

One enormous, very accurate magnifying glass.

NARRATOR: This magnifying glass has a  technical name, a sunlight refinery.  

To use it, find somewhere really sunny, plop  down a bunch of mirrors, bounce the sunlight  

into a single spot and you can melt just about  anything. Okay, so it is kind of death ray-ish.  

Why do this? Because manufacturing  steel or cement requires a lot of heat  

and making something super hot has  historically meant burning dinosaurs.

STEVE SCHELL: You look at the  massive carbon footprint that  

is associated with these industrial  applications and it can't be ignored.

NARRATOR: Twenty percent of global  carbon emissions to be precise.  

And because this technology is so good, it  might just change the entire energy industry.  

And prevent World War III in the process.

This is "Hard Reset," a series about  rebuilding our world from scratch.

Just east of Six Flags and north of LA is a place  called Lancaster, which is very flat, very hot and  

a perfect place to test a takeover of the world's  energy supply. [dramatic music] Yeah, that sounded  

more Bond villain-y than I thought it would.  Anyway, these are called heliostats and the reason  

this solar refinery works so well is that under  these mirrors and shot glasses are pretty simple  

motors that they can control remotely. And this  allows the mirrors to change angles throughout the  

day, depending on where the sun is. How do they  know where the sun is? Interns. No, AI, of course.

BILL GROSS: You need to take each of  thousands of mirrors and point them  

very, very precisely, accurate to  about 1/10 or 1/20 of a degree.

NARRATOR: That's Bill Gross, genius  visionary and founder of over 150 companies.  

Also super nice guy.

GROSS: Thank you, I really appreciate it.

NARRATOR: At the top of the tower, high-resolution  cameras monitor the position of the mirrors below.

SCHELL: You can actually see the two at the top  

are the easiest to pick out 'cause  they're on booms above the receiver.

NARRATOR: So Heliogen gets all those mirrors to  reflect sunlight into that big target at the top.

SCHELL: So what we've got just above us is the  solar receiver. So you can see that's what we saw  

from ground level. That's where that concentrated  sunlight is focused when the field is operating.

NARRATOR: The cameras know if the mirrors are  bouncing into the sun because those cameras are  

assessing the quality of the sky's blue. Let's  break that down with Steve, who has cool tattoos.

SCHELL: This is my robot battle armor  and what I have here is a jungle on  

an alien planet with robots tending the garden.

NARRATOR: And is in charge  of the technology stuff here.

SCHELL: What these cameras see is the reflection  of the sky close to the sun. Close to the sun,  

the sky appears very bright from the scattered  sunlight coming through it and the further away  

from the sun you look, the darker or less  bright that patch of sky appears to be.

NARRATOR: So the cameras look at the color blue  and the AI uses that information to assess the  

distance from the sun, deduce the orientation of  the mirror and therefore, where the beam is going.

SCHELL: So every few seconds, we get a measurement  of where that beam is going and we can command  

the heliostat to make small corrections to  optimize its tracking. In this industry,  

that is a complete game changer 'cause now we  don't rely on the hardware to be so precise,  

we have software to make it precise.  So it really changes everything about  

how that plant operates and allows us to reach  higher performance levels at a much lower cost.

NARRATOR: So software that controls accuracy,  not hardware. And the more accurate those  

mirrors can be throughout the day, the fewer  of them they actually need. More importantly,  

it allows Heliogen to do something that no other  concentrated solar refinery has been able to do.  

Generate temperatures north  of 1,000 degrees Celsius.

GROSS: People have done mirror concentration  before but they've achieved 400 degrees,  

500 degrees. We've achieved 1,500 degrees.

NARRATOR: That heat is important because  solar energy needs to be used immediately  

or stored somehow. Batteries  are expensive and problematic  

but you know what's cheap  and safe? Just normal rocks.

WALTER WHITE JR: You have a rock collection?

HANK SCHRADER: It's a mineral collection.

GROSS: And we take that high temperature  and we bring it down into a rock bed.  

We literally heat rocks to  1,000 degrees Centigrade.

SCHELL: The temperatures are so high, the  metal actually can't take it. So we put  

the insulation on the inside to protect  the steel from those high temperatures.

GROSS: If you heat rocks to 1,000  degrees Centigrade with the photons,  

they now stay hot even after the sun goes down.  

Those rocks are in an insulated tank, like  a thermos. And they'll stay hot for a week.

NARRATOR: Those rocks act as batteries,  

storing energy that can be used  to generate power 24 hours a day.

GROSS: It allows us to power things  that need to run around the clock.  

And civilization does run around the clock. NARRATOR: But wait a minute, haven't we heard  

this all before? How solar energy is gonna  revolutionize the world? The difference here  

seems to be that everything at Heliogen is  built around scale. This plant we went to is  

only a test facility, 400 heliostats. A proper  sunlight refinery will be 40,000 heliostats.

SCHELL: So 100 times as much solar  collector as what we have here.

NARRATOR: To build refineries all over  the world, they're betting on small.

GROSS: Make all the mirrors small so they  can be factory produced and make them easy  

to roll out because we don't need cranes or  heavy equipment to deploy them. Our vision  

was to make this like farming, so we could cover  lots of ground very inexpensively. Almost like a  

harvester or a tractor planting rows of seeds.  That is critical because to power the Earth, we  

need to cover hundreds of square miles, which is  actually not that much to power the whole planet.

NARRATOR: Really?

GROSS: But covering hundreds of square  miles needs to be done cost effectively.

SCHELL: We essentially designed  this to be highly automated,  

robotic tractors that can carve the trenches,  place the heliostat foundations, pour the  

concrete and then the drives and the mirrors  are set on afterward in a very efficient way.

NARRATOR: So the plan is that these  refineries go in places that are flat  

with lots of sun like desserts,  [bell dinging] deserts. Deserts.  

Then they take that concentrated  sunlight, convert it to electricity,  

put that electricity through an electrolyzer  and split a water molecule to get hydrogen.

GROSS: Green hydrogen can be put in  pipelines and moved thousands of miles  

or put on ships and moved across oceans. The  powerful thing about that is we can then make  

the energy where the sun is good and move it to  where the sun isn't. And that's what we need to do  

to power civilization. Beating the price of  fossil fuels is the only thing that matters  

'cause otherwise people will keep burning fossil  fuels if they're cheaper. But if we can be even  

a fraction of a cent cheaper than fossil  fuels, the world will adopt this at scale.

NARRATOR: And so what happens  if this is adopted at scale?  

Let's picture a scenario where the world  is powered by the sun, mirrors and rocks.

GROSS: My dream, by the end of this decade, would  be to have 1,000 towers in the southwest United  

States, 1,000 towers in Australia, and 1,000  towers in the Middle East and north Africa.  

That way, we can make energy for almost all of  the continents because we can move the energy  

from where the sun is good in those deserts to  where the people who need it live. [pensive music]

NARRATOR: In total, it would take an area about  the size of Alaska to produce enough energy to  

meet today's consumption rates and with that, we  could change the environment, and geopolitics.  

How many wars have been fought, how many  people have died essentially for oil? And  

those geopolitics are, in a way, the  inspiration for this whole endeavor.

GROSS: I do have one story about how I  lived through the energy crisis when I  

was a kid. It was 1973 during the Arab oil  embargo. There was a shortage of gasoline.  

So there were long lines of cars waiting at the  gas stations on Ventura Boulevard, just to get  

your $5 of gasoline. My mother would wait in  that line with me in the backseat of the car  

and I was thinking as we waited an hour to get our  gasoline, thinking about why is it that there's  

somewhere else in the world that could choose to  shut off our supply and now people are suffering?  

Why don't we have another way of getting our  energy that's more local? [dramatic music]

SCHELL: We have regular conversations  about climate refugees and about the wars  

that are fought over fossil fuels. We are  looking to stabilize the global politics.

GROSS: The sun is the most evenly distributed  natural resource we have, except for air, so why  

can't we take that resource and convert it to the  energy we need near where we are and not have to  

take it from someone else far away? So I feel  like my whole life and everything I learned  

allows me to be in the right place  at the right time to make a positive  

difference on this thing that the  world cares about so much right now.

NARRATOR: Come back next time for another episode  of "Hard Reset." Subscribe to Freethink to watch  

our other original series and documentaries about  technology and people that are changing our world.