- This might look like a death ray,
(dramatic music) (death ray shooting)
but it's not.
(dramatic music)
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.
- You look at the massive carbon footprint
that is associated with these industrial applications
and it can't be ignored.
- 20% of global carbon emissions to be precise.
And because this technology is so good,
it might just change the entire energy industry.
(banging)
And prevent World War III in the process.
(dramatic music)
This is "Hard Reset,"
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
(people screaming)
(dramatic music)
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?
(dramatic music)
Interns.
No, AI, of course.
- 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.
(inspirational music)
Also super nice guy.
- Thank you, I really appreciate it.
- At the top of the tower,
high-resolution cameras monitor the position
of the mirrors below.
- 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.
- 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.
- This is my robot battle armor
and what I have here is a jungle on an alien planet
with robots tending the garden.
- And is in charge of the technology stuff here.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- You have a rock collection?
- It's a mineral collection!
- And we take that high temperature
and we bring it down into a rock bed.
We literally heat rocks to 1,000 degrees Centigrade.
- 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.
- 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.
- It allows us to power things
that need to run around the clock.
And civilization does run around the clock.
(dramatic music)
- But wait a minute,
haven't we heard this all before?
How solar energy is gonna revolutionize the world?
(dramatic music)
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.
- So 100 times as much solar collector
as what we have here.
- To build refineries all over the world,
they're 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 hundreds of square miles,
which is actually not that much
to power the whole planet.
- Really?
- 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 in places
that are flat with lots of sun like desserts...
deserts.
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.
- 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.
- 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)
- 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.
(dramatic music)
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.
- 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)
- 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.
- 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.
(pensive music)
- 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.
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