November 20, 2019, 10:07 AM
SigmanicSecretive energy startup backed by Bill Gates achieves solar breakthrough
Fascinating!
New York (CNN Business)A secretive startup backed by Bill Gates has achieved a solar breakthrough aimed at saving the planet.
Heliogen, a clean energy company that emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday, said it has discovered a way to use artificial intelligence and a field of mirrors to reflect so much sunlight that it generates extreme heat above 1,000 degrees Celsius.
Essentially, Heliogen created a solar oven — one capable of reaching temperatures that are roughly a quarter of what you'd find on the surface of the sun.
The breakthrough means that, for the first time, concentrated solar energy can be used to create the extreme heat required to make cement, steel, glass and other industrial processes. In other words, carbon-free sunlight can replace fossil fuels in a heavy carbon-emitting corner of the economy that has been untouched by the clean energy revolution.
"We are rolling out technology that can beat the price of fossil fuels and also not make the CO2 emissions," Bill Gross, Heliogen's founder and CEO, told CNN Business. "And that's really the holy grail."
Heliogen, which is also backed by billionaire Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, believes the patented technology will be able to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industry. Cement, for example, accounts for 7% of global CO2 emissions, according to the International Energy Agency.
"Bill and the team have truly now harnessed the sun," Soon-Shiong, who also sits on the Heliogen board, told CNN Business. "The potential to humankind is enormous. ... The potential to business is unfathomable."
Unlike traditional solar power, which uses rooftop panels to capture the energy from the sun, Heliogen is improving on what's known as concentrated solar power. This technology, which uses mirrors to reflect the sun to a single point, is not new.
Concentrated solar has been used in the past to produce electricity and, in some limited fashion, to create heat for industry. It's even used in Oman to provide the power needed to drill for oil.
The problem is that in the past concentrated solar couldn't get temperatures hot enough to make cement and steel.
"You've ended up with technologies that can't really deliver super-heated systems," said Olav Junttila, a partner at Greentech Capital Advisors, a clean energy investment bank that has advised concentrated solar companies in the past.
Using artificial intelligence to solve the climate crisis
That means renewable energy has not yet disrupted industrial processes such as cement and steelmaking. And that's a problem because the world has an insatiable appetite for those materials. Cement, for instance, is used to make the concrete required to build homes, hospitals and schools. These industries are responsible for more than a fifth of global emissions, according to the EPA.
That's why the potential of Los Angeles-based Heliogen attracted investment from Gates, the Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder who recently surpassed Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos as the world's richest person.
"I'm pleased to have been an early backer of Bill Gross's novel solar concentration technology," Gates said in a statement. "Its capacity to achieve the high temperatures required for these processes is a promising development in the quest to one day replace fossil fuel."
While other concentrated solar companies attacked this temperature problem by adding steel to make the technology stiffer and sturdier, Heliogen and its team of scientists and engineers turned to artificial intelligence.
Heliogen uses computer vision software, automatic edge detection and other sophisticated technology to train a field of mirrors to reflect solar beams to one single spot.
"If you take a thousand mirrors and have them align exactly to a single point, you can achieve extremely, extremely high temperatures," Gross said, who added that Heliogen made its breakthrough on the first day it turned its plant on.
Heliogen said it is generating so much heat that its technology could eventually be used to create clean hydrogen at scale. That carbon-free hydrogen could then be turned into a fuel for trucks and airplanes.
"If you can make hydrogen that's green, that's a gamechanger," said Gross. "Long term, we want to be the green hydrogen company."
'No-brainer'
For now, Heliogen is squarely focused on solar. One problem with solar is that the sun doesn't always shine, yet industrial companies like cement makers have a constant need for heat. Heliogen said it would solve that issue by relying on storage systems that can hold the solar energy for rainy days.
Now that it has made this breakthrough, Heliogen will focus on demonstrating how the technology can be used in a large-scale application, such as making cement.
"We're in a race. We just want to scale as fast as possible," said Gross.
After the large-scale application, Soon-Shiong said Heliogen would likely be ready to go public.
In the meantime, Heliogen will require a healthy dose of capital to scale and it's working with investors on a private round of funding. Soon-Shiong signaled he plans to invest more in Heliogen. Heliogen declined to provide information on how much money it has raised so far.
"This is an existential issue for your children, for my children and our grandchildren," Soon-Shiong said.
Heliogen's biggest challenge will be convincing industrial companies using fossil fuels to make the investment required to switch over. Gross said the company has been talking to potential customers privately and plans to soon announce its first customers.
"If we go to a cement company and say we'll give you green heat, no CO2, but we'll also save you money, then it becomes a no-brainer," said Gross.
Its biggest selling point is the fact that, unlike fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, sunlight is free. And Heliogen argues its technology is already economical against fossil fuels because of its reliance on AI.
"The only way to compete is to be extremely clever in how you use your materials. And by using software, we're able to do that," Gross said.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/19...ill-gates/index.htmlNovember 20, 2019, 10:42 AM
joel9507quote:
Originally posted by Sigmanic:
One problem with solar is that the sun doesn't always shine, yet industrial companies like cement makers have a constant need for heat. Heliogen said it would solve that issue by relying on storage systems that can hold the solar energy for rainy days.
Yeah, go ahead and buy one of these and feel good about saving the planet, but then if you want high heat on demand, you'll need to buy and install a storage system, and then buy and install yet another system for the storage system to power.
A lot of capital investment to recover with the power savings. So, cool tech, but going to be a hard sell, I suspect.
November 20, 2019, 10:49 AM
signewtquote:
Combine really efficient solar collector with molten salt storage and you have carbon free energy 24/7/365.
ah yes....now comes the training/pay scale for molten-salt-storage-repair-technicians, a host of necessary upgrade/reboot/licensing $ for that software & /before/during/ever-after taxation on every aspect thereof.
Including similar notion now under Oregon legislative concern, how much to charge those marvelous electric vehicles for 'road tax' absent their petroleum road tax fees.
Don't intend to be a downer about this, just a skeptic that will work quite as the glowing article suggests.
November 20, 2019, 11:01 AM
sjtillThis particular innovation may or may not be a true breakthrough in reducing carbon emissions. And if it is, then it may or may not reduce anthropogenic global warming.
But it is an example of why the Leftist Church’s answer to their putative “climate emergency” is not more socialism, but more capitalism with more innovation.
Unfortunately, as with computer technology, it will lead to even more concentration of wealth, as this example shows.
November 20, 2019, 11:35 AM
maladatquote:
Originally posted by BBMW:
I was going to go there also. Maybe they figured out some sort of whizbang AI algorithm to control the mirrors.
quote:
Originally posted by nhtagmember:
not sure I understand the breakthrough
there are already several operational systems out in the desert
From a cursory look at the article, the issue is that the current concentrating solar plants use an open-loop control system.
"Open-loop" means there's no feedback - based on the location of the sun and the location of the tower, the correct direction for each mirror to point is computed, and then the correct positions for each of the actuators on each mirror are computed, and then each actuator is moved to the computed position.
The problem is that the aiming mechanisms are not perfect, and the mirrors don't end up pointing exactly where you want them to. If you're trying to generate electricity by using the reflected sunlight to generate steam to power a steam turbine, no problem.
If you're trying to make cement or steel, you need higher temperatures, and the sunlight can't be concentrated in a small enough area to reach those temperatures.
The new technology described in the article is the introduction of a closed-loop control system which uses digital cameras, image recognition algorithms, etc., to improve the aiming precision of the mirrors to generate higher temperatures by concentrating the reflected sunlight in a smaller area.
November 20, 2019, 12:29 PM
nhtagmemberI read the article, chuckled a bit and then moved on
they're generating higher temps for processes that don't exist yet
no cement plant is going to build the infrastructure to support one of these systems when the alternatives are so much cheaper
I think its a big whup
you can generate really high temperatures with a laser, and no one is suggesting we use lasers to make cement or smelt steel
November 20, 2019, 12:39 PM
maladatquote:
Originally posted by Dakor:
Any article that uses the surface of the Sun as a temp reference, makes me shake my head in disgust. H-wood does the same damn thing. Yes, the surface is tens of thousands of Kelvins but the magnetosphere is MILLIONS of Kelvins. You can’t get to the surface unless you pass through it (good luck with that) and even then the magnetosphere occasionally encompasses the actual surface (sunspots)... so any idiot making a correlation is guilty of HYPE and therefore part of the lamestream media.
Actually, the "surface of the sun" temperature is the one that is the most relevant here.
It is impossible to use radiated energy to heat an object to a higher temperature than that of the object radiating the energy.
For the purposes of the sun's radiated energy, its temperature is ~5800 K, approximately the temperature of the surface of the sun.
If you covered the entire earth in mirrors and pointed them at something, you couldn't get it hotter than ~5800K.
So saying their solar concentrator can be used to get an object to "a quarter the temperature of the surface of the sun" is essentially a measure of the efficiency of their concentrator.