Well, thank you very much. I’m Bill Gross from eSolar. It’s an honor to be here.
ESolar is making solar electricity competitive with fossil fuels
with no subsidies.
This is the eSolar power plant on top.
This is the coal plant that we want to compete
and put out of business on the bottom.
We want to make solar energy than coal with no subsidies.
The way we do that is we take very small mirrors,
hundreds of thousands of small mirrors,
reflect sunlight up to a central tower, make steam, and run a steam turban.
We have a breakthrough technology to drive down the price of this.
This idea is an old idea though.
Idea of a power tower has been around for a long time.
But our breakthrough is very disruptive in dramatically lowering the price
to actually make this affordable for the first time.
The big disruption we’ve come up with is prefabrication
and software help... rhythms.
We take a very large mirror which people have used in the past,
and break it up into hundreds of very tiny mirrors
and then we use lots of software to very carefully articulate all those mirrors
to concentrate all the sunlight precisely to one point.
We dramatically reduce the steel, we dramatically reduce the labor.
The entire thing comes to the fact... to the field prefabricated.
This is a container showing up from the manufacturer
with all of our racks folded up like an accordion
with all of the wiring and testing already done.
These are then gonna be unfolded on to the ground
and deployed with everything already tested at the factory.
That’s never been done before.
Here are the racks after they’ve been taken out of the shipping container.
Because we can prefabricate at a factory we can use automation techniques
as opposed to field welding, field electricians, field labor.
Imagine people trying to assemble these from scratch out in the desert
compared to doing this in automated fashion on an assembly line.
That’s the real breakthrough. It takes one-tenth of labor.
Here you could see the workers deploying the field
and there’s a bunch of ballast which is based around the field,
little 60 pound weights that are spread out ever couple of meters,
and then the workers are now just bolting it down to the ballast.
The total tool required is a pocket wrench.
That’s the only thing they’re using to fasten this whole field
coz all the wiring is already in the frames, everything’s been tested.
Even the mirrors show up prefabricated.
The mirrors are small. No one’s ever used a mirror this small.
It’s about the size of a plasma screen, about one square meter.
They show up on pallets, they get rolled down the field,
they’re light enough to be lifted by one person, no crane required,
they get lifted in place, the same wrench tightens the mirror in place.
All of these can be done very inaccurately
coz the software is gonna make up for everything. That’s the real breakthrough.
Here you can see the workers adding the mirrors to the rows.
The rows can be crooked. The guys can be drunk when they’re putting down the rows.
The frames can be bent. None of that matters
coz software’s gonna do everything after the fact to make everything reflect perfectly.
And that’s where we put all of our effort, a lot of software, low amount of steel.
Now, after the rows are put together
you can see all the mirrors flat on their still position over,
all the mirrors here in a leaning position, and you could see the unfolded accordion racks,
and all these just sitting on the ground as one link structure, very, very inexpensive.
We used half the steel in attempt to labor to get this whole field in place.
Even the tower that we put up on the middle of the field, that is prefabricated as well.
Typically, the tower is a couple hundred meters tall.
It’s a concrete structure. It takes six months to a year to build.
We use a two piece prefabricated windmill tower that takes one day to erect,
so from six months to one day.
Again, everything about making this has to be done in advance at a factory
if you want to compete with fossil fuels.
After the field is all together, the tower is up, the mirrors are spread out inaccurately,
four camera towers at the corner then take over and use our proprietary software
to figure out the position of every mirror
and the angle of the exiting beam of every mirror
so we can automatically move every mirror to reflect the sunlight to the tower.
That’s all done instantly and very precisely.
When we give the command, all the mirror shine their light up to the tower,
so you can see every mirror... has a slightly different angle.
Not only is every mirror at different angle,
it has to move all day long at a different angle as well.
But software can take care of that.
We can even run all the software from our headquarters in Pasadena
for plants all over the world.
So this is really heavily a software company,
more of a software company than almost any other solar company before.
This is a close up of the receiver on top of the tower.
Twelve thousand mirrors shining about a thousand watts each
are blasting this with 12 megawatts of thermal energy.
That gets converted to steam, convert water to steam in the pipes inside here,
the steam comes down the tower, goes to a turban, generates electricity,
just like additional power plant.
Because we have thermal energy we can run around the clock by...
with fossil fuels or with biomass or with any other type of thermal storage.
We can make electricity cost effectively almost anywhere in the world
except where it’s white.
So we have an unbelievable opportunity.
We’re currently building 3,500 megawatts around the world,
2,000 in China, 1,000 in India, 500 in United States.
And here I am smiling in the field.
My dream since I was a teenager was to find out a way to harness the sun cost effectively
and actually compete with fossil fuels.
That’s the way to change the world.
I feel with eSolar that dream is finally becoming a reality.
Thank you very much.