sunlight solar refinery
The Solar Refinery
Vocabulary
| ray | look like | enormous |
| refine | accurate | scratch (2) |
| sunny | bunch of | plop down |
| bounce | spot (3) | just about |
| melt | receiver | manufacture |
| steel | field (2) | put on (2) |
| steal | chief (2) | associated with |
| require | massive | carbon footprint |
| ignore | emission | application (2) |
| precise | prevent | in the process |
| flag (3) | magnify | from scratch |
| flat (3) | takeover | shot glass |
| shot (3) | supply (2) | demand (2) |
| allow | patch (2) | depending on |
| angle | accurate | degree (3) |
| genius | visionary | position (3) |
| tower | scale (3) | resolution (2) |
| photon | pipe (2) | easy/easier/the easiest |
| kind of | boom (3) | pick out (2) |
| ground | shut off | concentrate (2) |
| assess | focus (3) | bounce (2) |
| cement | stuff (2) | break down (2) |
| scatter | reflect (2) | remote (2) |
| beam | even (2) | orientation |
| deduce | take it (2) | measurement |
| fuel (2) | optimize | game changer |
| achieve | store (2) | command |
| heat | pick out | insulation |
| stay (2) | go down | revolutionize |
| facility | thermos | around the clock |
| crane | plant (3) | run/ran/run (2) |
| proper | roll out | monitor (2) |
| deploy | vision (2) | except for |
| row (3) | founder | critical (2) |
| seed | effective | square kilometers |
| cost | automate | cost effective |
| pour | concrete | foundation |
| split | convert | go in place |
| rely | molecule | inspiration |
| harvest | pipeline | power (3) |
| mile | mean (3) | across (3) |
| fossil | thing (2) | beat/beat/beaten (2) |
| price | hydrogen | fossil fuel |
| fraction | track (3) | distribute |
| way (2) | scenario | dream (2) |
| area (2) | stabilize | consumption |
| rate | efficient | fight/fought/fought |
| crisis | embargo | endeavor |
| line (2) | shortage | ground level |
| suffer | refugee | essentially |
| appear | adopt (2) | natural resource |
| air | cover (2) | convert (2) |
| care (2) | right now | take it from |
Video
Transcript
This might look like a death ray, but it’s not. It’s actually one enormous, very accurate magnifying glass. 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 Shell, CTO and Chief Engineer, Heliogen: “You look at the massive carbon footprint that is associated with these industrial applications and it can’t be ignored.”
Twenty percent (20%) 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.
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? AI, of course.
Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, Heligen: “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.”
That’s Bill Gross, genius visionary and founder of over 150 companies. At the top of the tower, high-resolution cameras monitor the position of the mirrors below.
Steve Shell, CTO and Chief Engineer, Heliogen: “You can actually see the two at the top are the easiest to pick out ’cause they’re on booms above the receiver.”
So Heliogen gets all those mirrors to reflect sunlight into that big target at the top.
Steve Shell, CTO and Chief Engineer, Heliogen: “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.”
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.
And is in charge of the technology stuff here.
Steve Shell, CTO and Chief Engineer, Heliogen: “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.”
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.
Steve Shell, CTO and Chief Engineer, Heliogen: “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.”
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.
Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, Heligen: “People have done mirror concentration before but they’ve achieved 400 degrees, 500 degrees. We’ve achieved 1,500 degrees.”
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.
Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, Heligen: “And we take that high temperature and we bring it down into a rock bed. We literally heat rocks to 1,000 degrees Centigrade.”
Steve Shell, CTO and Chief Engineer, Heliogen: “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.”
Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, Heliogen: “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.”
Those rocks act as batteries, storing energy that can be used to generate power 24 hours a day.
Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, Heliogen: “It allows us to power things that need to run around the clock. And civilization does run around the clock.
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.
Steve Shell, CTO and Chief Engineer, Heliogen: “So 100 times as much solar collector as what we have here.”
To build refineries all over the world, they’re betting on small.
Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, Heliogen: “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.
But covering hundreds of square miles needs to be done cost effectively.”
Really?
Steve Shell, CTO and Chief Engineer, Heliogen: “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 in places that are flat with lots of sun like deserts. Then they take that concentrated sunlight, convert it to electricity, put that electricity through an eletrolyzer and split a water molecule to get hydrogen.
Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, Heliogen: “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.”
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.
Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, Heliogen: “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.”
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.
Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, Heligen: “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?”
Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, Heliogen: “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.”
Bill Gross, Founder and CEO, Heliogen: “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.”
Questions
Millimeter. Is the sunlight refinery supposed to be good, bad, both or neither for the environment?
Centimeter. Describe the ideal climate, topography and geography for the solar refinery?
Meter. Is the solar refinery power based on solar panels that produce photovoltaic electricity?
Kilometer. Are the solar reflectors stationary or mobile? Are their movements based on a simple unalterable, mechanized motion?
Milligram. Does the Heliogen solar refinery need lots of mirrors to generate lots of heat? How much heat can it produce?
Gram. At night, the solar refinery cannot produce any power. Is this right or wrong? Do they use batteries to store electricity?
Kilogram. Will setting up new heliostats (reflector posts) require lots of manpower (many workers)?
Degrees Celsius. Most of the solar refineries will be in developed regions like Canada, Europe, Australia and urban centers around the world. Is this right or wrong?
Square Meter. According to the presenter, will solar refineries end or reduce global wars?
Square Kilometer. Does your city, region and country consume lots of energy and electric power? What are the main consumers of energy?
Cubic Centimeter. What are the main sources of energy and electricity?
Liter. Has there been much investments and programs in renewable energy (sustainable energy, green energy)? What are some examples?
Cubic Meter. Is there much debate, discussions, arguments and controversy over the global warming, the environment, the economy, jobs, etc?
Volts. What might happen in the future?
Milliliter. What other solutions are there for environment destruction, global warming and climate change?
Watts. What could and should individuals do?
