Heliogen’s new tech could unlock renewable energy for industrial manufacturing

Can someone please explain where the innovation is here? I’m not very familiar with solar generation.

Given that we know the suns position and that of the mirrors, how is computer vision able to better aim the mirrors?

What am I missing?

Interesting application for concentrated solar. If you just need heat instead of electricity, it's suddenly more efficient.

Sucks if you have a cement factory in Seattle, you're going to have a harder time competing with one in California.

From what I read on the site here and on a Guardian article it looks like it is a modified Solar tower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Solar...

I don't see where AI comes in at all.

So in principle, couldn’t you aim the mirrors in a straightforward way by attaching some kind of radiation emitter (maybe pulsed) to the collector? If the mirror can sense the sunlight angle and the incident angle of the sentry, you don’t need any additional position information — the mirror plane is normal to the angle bisector.

This smacks of a manufactured PR piece.

This is really nice. I just wonder whether it heats the air so much near the focal point that it creates an updraft that pulls in and fries insects and birds? (Not that this would stop it from bring a net-positive.)

Looks interesting, but it's not hot enough yet for a lot of industrial processes. E.g. iron melts at ~1500C and this is currently at ~1000C.

What was the power output that was generated by all those mirrors, and what was the area of the footprint for the facility?

Someone was asking me about trigering fusion with this, and i think fusion at the core of the sun is at millions °C, and at the surface you get 5500°C, so beacuse photons carry entropy and the photons of the surface is what you see, you will never be hotter than the surface of the sun, even as much rays you can concentrate. It is not a mather of how much rays you get but of pure entropy. Hotter means more entropy. You can not create more entropy in this case.

Please someone correct me if im wrong.

Solar furnaces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_furnace have been useful for reaching especially high temperatures since at least Trombe's 1949 furnace, which can hit 3500°, without computer vision or even closed-loop control. So why is a 1500° solar furnace being touted as a groundbreaking innovation and a new high-temperature landmark?

A friend asked me what I thought about this earlier, based on a somewhat better reprinting of their press release:

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/company-backed-bill-gates-clai...

Scroll back to 2010, when Bill Gross started working on this. That's when he got funded by that dude whose futurism book about the Information Superhighway, The Road Ahead, didn't mention the internet. In 1995. In 2010, photovoltaic modules cost €1.62 per watt. Concentrating solar power was a promising alternative; it uses the same steam engines used by coal and nuclear power plants, so at scale it should be just as cheap as they are, as long as you can get the cost of the heliostats under control somehow and scale up. It also didn't have that pesky intermittency problem PV modules have: you can store the heat overnight.

Since then, though, heat engines have become economically uncompetitive relative to PV, because PV modules now cost €0.19 per watt, where they've been stuck all year. And steam turbines, almost a century and a half old, aren't improving or getting cheaper rapidly the way PV has been. Being just as cheap as coal isn't a blessing anymore; it's a handicap.

So, if you've been working on CSP and filing patents for a decade before getting your pilot plant up and running, a decade during which the PV market has left your product's price in the dust, what do you do? You look for a possible use where CSP is still viable, such as process heat; you hire a good PR firm; you announce that you won't be building any plants, but you're "willing to partner with" companies that want to build your design; and you hope to God nobody says "Solyndra".

But what's the actual invention? It seems like the actual news is that Bill Gross has patented some aspect of his closed-loop control system using webcams and GPU-accelerated CV to figure out where the mirrors are pointing to improve your concentration factor. The key improvement that made it possible was better GPUs, according to the press release, anyway.

So what happened, from the point of view of anyone outside Idealab, is that now Idealab and Intellectual Ventures will sue you if you do this fairly obvious thing of using high-resolution webcams for precise heliostat control.

So, when would this be a sensible thing to do?

Trombe's solar furnace and similar devices are able to compete quite effectively in the "market" for process heat at the 2500–3500° level, since, as I said, 1949. (I guess Bill's PR firm didn't know this, or hopes you don't.) That's a level almost impossible to achieve using fire (oxy-acetylene burns at 3500° under ideal conditions), and difficult even with arc furnaces. But Bill's thing is designed for a more prosaic 1000–1500° level, where it's competing not only with fire but also Kanthal or SiC fed from PV, wind, hydro, and nukes, as well as induction, dielectric heating, and microwave heating.

The potential advantage of CSP for process heat at these lower temperatures is that it's cheap and abundant. If you fill a field with mirrors, they can harvest 6× as much power than PV modules covering the same field can. But if land area is your limiting factor, your cement plant or steel mill or whatever probably isn't in the middle of a big field; it's using a lot more energy than your land receives in sunlight. In that case, you probably want to pull your power from someplace further off, whether in the form of coal, oil, gas, biomass, or electricity. Probably electricity from PV panels if we're talking about anything post-2030.

But suppose you can put your factory in the field where the mirrors are, and the limiting resource isn't land but money. In that case, it might be a reasonable approach. PV modules cost €30 a square meter now. That's probably more expensive than mirrors, if you take into account that mirrors give you 6x as much energy: €180 per square meter is the price mirrors have to beat, and that seems doable.

But now you are on notice: if you do that, make sure it's in a country where Intellectual Ventures's shell companies haven't gotten a patent on it, or you have to deal with patent trolls. The press release reprinted above is clear: as with IV's laser mosquito swatter, they aren't going to make it happen themselves, but they'll definitely "partner with" you if you try.

I think we're about to see a giant boom in shitty "do well-known thing X, but with computer vision" patents similar to the shitty "do well-known thing X, but on a computer/on the internet" patents that plagued us in the early 2000s. The availability of massive GPU power means that many things that used to be impractical to do with video data have become possible.

I thought the problem with CSP was excessive concentration, e.g. when tonopah plant blasted a hole in the side of their tower.

Somebody please tell me that I should not lose sleep about this scenario: Take this array of mirrors and mount them to a cloud of drones. Launch it on a sunny day, fly it to the correct position and focus a greater than 1000 degree Celsius beam of photons on your enemies.

The scary thing about this is that it requires nothing more than mirrors, drones and software, and not a deep military industrial complex.

This, coupled with new software-defined microinverters that work whether the grid is up or down[1], is changing the game worldwide for safe solar AC. I for one am very excited.

[1] https://enphase.com/en-us/ensemble-technology-enphase-instal...

This ain't new tech, buzzword + solar tower = headlines. I really love this method of solar though, minimal carbon footprint, ~0% efficiency decay. Coupled w a Sterling engine could even be used for small, off grid energy source.

Bogus stuff here.

Will explain why in a later comment, you have to think through the embodied energy flow and materials required to transport etc...as well as solar capacity factor domestically and globally.

Solar panels and Steel Windturbines are manufactured from hydrocarbon feedstock.

Solar and wind drawdowns are powered by natural gas peaking.

Transporting energy intensive Cement and other feedstocks that are manufactured in areas of "renewables viability" are moved with non-renewables sources. (low sulfur bunker fuel maritime ships, diesel-lng-cng trucks, and large earth movers)

Most of the world's volumetric cement consumption happens in areas with low quality/intensity solar.

> Previous commercial concentrating solar thermal systems could only reach temperatures of 565 degrees Celsius, the company said. That’s useful for generating power, but can’t meet the needs of industrial processes.

Or we could build more nuclear power plants, which have the duty cycle necessary for industrial applications. It's no wonder that the more conservative politicians seem to love nuclear more: it's a pro-business, pro-industry carbon-free energy source, unlike wind and solar (or the insane amount of batteries to make it work.

There is only 1 solutions for climate change and 1 that can slow it down fast enuff to give us the time to possible get the only solution to work. Onley Nuclear reactors is clean enuff to slow down the the co2 released in to the atmosphere. 4gram co2/kWh/0.05$ it produces sheep enuff electricity to use carbon catcher and convert energy of co2 to something else. 200gram co2 would set the electricity prices at 0.25$/kWh to customers and we are soon out of drinking water in the world's so 50% on co2 and 50% convert salt water to fresh water will set the electricity price at ~0.45$/kWh. That will buy us time to hopefully figure out fusion before 2080. No one knows if its even possible that we can control that kind of energy to produce electricity for civil use. To just fill the electricity demand the world would need 50 new reactors every week untill 2035 to avoid a global energy crisis, and we would still need fusion before 2080 to start the amount of co2 to go back to as it was in the 1980s before 2200. Renewable energy will never even make a visual mark on a energy production of zero co2 graf and less of one, on the negative co2 graf. Renewable will be a good alternative on some very geografical optimal places that's it. Alot of people this day seems to forget that the E in the formula E=mc2 stands for Energy=everything(mass) both are the same and lay the ground for 1916 general relativity theory. Better known as the law of physics or easier, reality... just run the numbers, GRT doesn't care about money, politics or magic... it's simply predict what work and don't with the same certainty as it predict the time and date for the next solar eclipse.