How Concentrated Solar Power Could Fuel the Future

The sunlight refinery might look like a death ray, but it’s not..

It is an enormous and very accurate magnifying glass. This magnifying glass has a technical name, a sunlight refinery. To use it there is a need for more sunlight and a bunch of mirrors. The mirrors bounce the sunlight into a single spot and can melt anything. It’s kind of a death ray-ish.

Manufacturing steel or cement requires a lot of heat and making something super-hot has historically meant burning dinosaurs. The massive carbon footprint that is associated with these industrial applications, and can’t be ignored. 20% of global carbon emissions are monitored. This technology is so beneficial that it might just change the entire energy industry and prevent world war III. This is a Hard Reset, a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.

In the North of Los Angeles, there is a place called Lancaster, which is very flat and hot, and it is the perfect place to test a takeover of the world’s energy supply. Those sequences of glass 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. This allows the mirrors to change angles throughout the day, depending on where the sun is.

You need to take each of thousands of mirrors and point them very precisely and accurately to about the 10th or 20th of a degree. At the top of the tower, high-resolution cameras monitor the position of the mirrors below. They are placed above the receiver. So, halogen gets all those mirrors to reflect sunlight into that big target at the top. So, there is above a solar receiver where that concentrated sunlight is focused when the fuel is operating. The cameras know that the mirrors are bouncing into the sun because they are assessing the quality of the sky’s blue. They see 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 the sky appears to be. So, the cameras look at the color blue and AI (Artificial Intelligence) uses that information to assess the distance from the sun, deduce the orientation of the mirror. After every few seconds, we will get a measurement of where that beam is going and we can command the heliostat to make small corrections to optimize its tracking. Because now we don’t need to rely on the hardware to be so precise. There is software to make it precise. It changes everything about how that plant operates and allows us to reach higher performance at a much lower cost. The software that controls accuracy, not hardware and the more accurate those mirrors can be throughout the day, the fewer of them they need. More importantly, it allows heliogen to do something that no other concentrated solar refinery has been able to do, it generates temperature north of 1,000 degrees Celsius. People have done mirror concentration before, but they’ve achieved 400-500 degrees temperature, but now 1500 degrees have been achieved. That heat is important because solar energy needs to be used immediately or stored somehow. Batteries are expensive and problematic, but do you know what’s cheap and safe? The normal rocks. It’s a mineral collection. These rocks are heated to 1000 degrees centigrade. The temperature is so high that the metal can’t take it, so, the insulation is put inside to protect the steel from that high temperature. If you heat rocks to a 1000 degree centigrade with the photos, they stay hot even after the sun goes down. Those rocks are in an insulated tank like a thermos and they will stay hot for a week. Those rocks act as batteries, storing energy that can be used to generate power 24 hours a day. It allows us to power things that need to run around the clock. And civilization does run around the clock. Haven’t we heard this all before, how solar energy is going to revolutionize the world?

  Bill Gross (founder of CEO Heliogen) said at his testing farm of Heliogen;

“The difference here seems to be that everything around Heliogen is built around the scale. To build refineries all over the world, they are betting on small.  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 100 square miles, which is not that much to power the whole planet. But covering hundreds of square miles needs to be done cost-effectively. 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. So, the plan is that these refineries go to places that are flat with lots of sunlight, like deserts. Then they take that concentrated sunlight, convert it to electricity, but that electricity through an electrolyzer, and split a water molecule to get hydrogen. Green hydrogen can be put in pipelines and moved thousands of miles or put on ships and moved across oceans. Then the energy can be made where the sun is good and move 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 because 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 a large scale.