mister ken, as of next status expos, the possibilities of store solar energy that's up after the break. i've never started as far as thank you so much for being with us the on the long voyage through the ocean. another how well with the calls for a long time they had to be humans on the journey. now the trenches have become very protective of whales and tassels. the results of the ocean conservation start september full dw. yeah. dream of beauty and happiness at affordable prices. this is how turkish clinics attract customers from around the world. terrific scars and even tests are common

experiences. sorry for that for me. now the victims and survivors are demanding accountability reporters this weekend on dw, on the checkout this documentary from the late seventy's, the light is converted directly into electricity. no moving parts. it's the perfect solar machine. people were fascinated by photovoltaic solar cells. it's just, they were outrages, lee expensive. this is the biggest collection of photo sales ever assembled. it cost a quarter of a $1000000.00. it only produces enough electricity for 3 or 4 families. and that's what arrival technology came into play. large merits that's can also to, in some beams, into electricity by focusing the light from the sun and using its heat. what you're

seeing is the world's 1st commercial solar and electric power plant. it's called solar one. concentrated solar power seems like the most promising solar technology, big event, but skipped to today. and it's been almost completely forgot the story behind it. this one of great expectations, your clean, consistent, and reliable energy. equally big disappointment that present doing this project failed and may be one of the revival because concentrated sola can do one very crucial thing that sold a sales cons. oh, you might've seen a concentrated solar power or see is p plants that looks like this before. especially if you into your hollywood, sy fi the sp times can also look a bit less futuristic like this. but it's fundamentally they work the same way. they use a mirror, us to reflect and concentrate some lights. it's cheap. they could, i mean,

did that, should that, that is coming from this i, i mean, this is chubby, a lot of who call themselves a csp evangelist. he's a mechanical engineer who has worked on many concentrated solar projects around the world, showing up on 17, i believe above the $1000.00 times. the sun do not talk to the point. and this type of these plants, that particular point would be the top of the tower inside it as a fluid, purely molten salt, salt salt, and it's a liquid form that gets heated up by the sun's energy molten sold. this then comes down to it, generates up that boils water to produce sleep, which in turn can be used to spend a turbine that generates electricity the same time that you can cause, you know, i'm not a small, uh, let's say the function by 1 o'clock. but we solve the problem even if you need function flow after that to solve has cooled down, so it gets pumped up the tower and the cycle stops again. and for this process to work properly, do you need a lot of direct sunlight,

which is why you find some plants and countries like chile, morocco, the united arab emirates, or india, but most of them on the hot pots of spain in the us. so why is it that when we hear solar energy, most of us immediately think of photovoltaics solar cells and not mirror us, but concentrate sunlight? i'm old enough to remember. in 2010, no say we but super optimistic about solar at the industries to generation. jenny? chase is a solar analyst at the energy research from bluebook any? yes. back then that word, for example, big dreams to set up huge, concentrated solar plans in this a higher um and cynthia electricity to europe via cable for a long time. so this type of was the main utility scale. so technology, however, what happened then was that it makes it up to 10 numbers. you got the tape. and 1st of all types go super cheap. in a little over a decade. the price for electricity from solar photovoltaics dropped by almost 90 percent. there were a bunch of reasons for this main, the policy support in germany,

which kicks out to the growing solar industry in china. we covered them in this video. you should check out after this. concentrated solar power also became cheaper to in 2011. it started costing more than foldable takes today. it's more than twice as expensive. this meant people begin to turn away from it and put up the cheapest solar panels instead. wasn't so much the solar panels. i'll stick with one of the physical size one. that is also because we've sold a family or concentrated solar. every single mirror needs to individually check the sense of movement. so they always direct the race to exactly the right points. and depending on the size of the plants, this could be thousands of mirrors. and then you have to account for clouts, which may block one part of the mirror fields, but not all of it. that makes it hard to control the temperature at the top of the tower, which needs to stay within the fixed range compared to all of this solar panels are just pretty easy to handle. when you put it on your roof or when you put it on the field or when you put another lake or wherever you put it,

it's just very simple. this is richard, tony who's been researching, concentrated solar powered technology and policy for the last decade. it's just sitting there and have to painted maybe from time to time, but it's not operationally complex as csp where you have mirrors that you need to adjust to, you know, under real environmental conditions c. c. ponds are generally also custom built which makes them expensive. so in order to make them what that they need to be big, which means more challenging to engineer and handle a case and points this make a project. welcome to the future of power generation, crescent dunes in the us state of nevada, and we're supposed to revolutionize clean electricity. the cost of all things, $1000000000.00 to builds. and when it started to run in 2015 expectations were high . and then the problems began, never reached, it's expected everetts outputs, which was supposed to power $75000.00 homes. also because there were lots and lots of outages due to technical problems. often to do with the molten salt. the plot

used most of so is a paid to work with because if something does go wrong and it drops below it, some, it's melting point, then you don't have both. and so any while you have started salt and then your pipes are full of solid sold and this is a big pain to sort out one time the plant had to shut down for 8 months and then another time i moved to sold, thank leak. then the ground good contaminated so the entire tower had to be taken down. the plant eventually close, then solar was of the company behind it ceased to operate. they were really, you know, they were really rock'n'roll and silicon valley type of guy. so they were okay, we're going to revolutionize the world and we need to build lots of these towers and they were, you know, move past and break things. and, and turns out for csp that wasn't the, the right approach, right? because they need to figure stuff out to operations and maintain and spend the night spending that it takes some time. chris and dunes generate small amounts of electricity again, but a ton is the image of csp, particularly in the us,

which hasn't built another big plant since other mega projects like the idea to build big plants in the so how about the power of europe also fell flat today and all of the world's plants taking together have a generating capacity of 7 gigawatts, for comparison, the $1700.00 peak of what's of photovoltaics solar panels out there. so csp is never made it big, and it seen it's fast sheriff setbacks. but there's one reason why we shouldn't give up on the idea. yes. and that's the same reason why china has been building many of these in the past. yes. because that's one thing that's affordable takes come to the thing about federal tax. it really does not generate that night, but it's concentrated so the can new up plants don't just heat up multiple sold to you straight away. they also have big tanks to store it. once it stops, it only includes by one degree celsius per day in there. and can be used to run the turbine at the lights up points like after the sun is going down. cool. and lots of people are using lots of electricity all at once. it's important to have these

clean sources of energy. we can dispatch around the clock as we pluck more renewables into upgrades, because they only work when the sun shines with the wind blows. having this flexible supply might also justify paying a little more. for the future of csp, move to the different nice right sides and used to be a power technology like wind, mtv. and now it's really very much a storage technology. is it ralph? cause other ways to store electricity like lithium ion battery is that now often get billed right next to solar funds. but that's typically used to shift up to 4 hours worth of energy. you can build big a batteries to cover the night for example, but that will be very expensive. since volt insult is quite cheap, it's more economical to use this for longer periods. it's also possible to use electricity from sol dependents to heat up the molten salts, but that's less efficient than directly using csp to capture the sun seats at least a sizes with lots of sunshine safety. here's the the dog and it's about 6 they use because we lost the dice on energy about the realities for the provision of not on

the special energy visits. there's nothing that's the street. this is craig, what's the c e o a fast company that's working on new designs to fix the problems? concentrated solar power them had in the past. with the system. you know, we got solid, terribly nice, hot, sunny places you end up needing to the fossil fuels, so they're not from energy. they already built a small demonstration plan to eastern australia to prove that technology works. the next step is to build a big of ones with 8 hours of storage. this report by the us national renewable energy in the par 3. so if that's the manual, it was compiled after the failure of crescent views and analyzes all the problems. it's and other sees the plants and counted and that's, that's really great cool because, you know, she kind of learn from the mistakes of the past in there's not really as each of the technology. as you can see, they build several small talus instead of one big one. they say this makes it easier to build and to vary the size of plants without having to come up with

custom designs each time, which saves money. also it's liquid sodium, so and metal and not molten salts that's circulating through that system. if this becomes solid in case of a shut down, it's easier to melt again. then salts the boston, not the only one. so took an interest in the csp reports that become the, the chinese use be engineer, come book like that, a bite of what has now changed. every thing for us is p at the moment, is that china is, you know, getting into a big, china is re discovering, concentrated solar power around 30 plants and development label than anywhere else . that's because every renewable talk with one gigawatts capacity now must include 10 percent of storage. and the government issued this notice saying it will support the large scale and industrialized development of solar thermal power. the idea is

simple. during the day you use solar p, v to produce cheap electricity and concentrate that sold out. so he top your storage tanks. then at nights when the solar panels lie idle, you use the stored heat to run your turbine. so what does this mean for concentrated solar kinds of technology really stage of come back? well, a lot depends on whether the china sold a tile has become a success. and a sort of a tower spin. have a real possibility of developing economies of scale to, to really figure out how everything works. and then we'll hopefully see the same thing that we saw with p b or with wind. but those supply chain gains from china really enabled or re cheap or better at products that will be available will also in other countries and, and africa potentially in your, potentially in the us. but this would also mean those other countries have to see the potential and put policies in place to support the technology without support

and will be hard for csp to get off the ground again. either way, it will likely never get as big as people ones thought it was sold a sales have one the technology raise and catch at the mass market. but speed might've fountain unique and it will be exciting to see whether it can phillips the. did you ever heard about this crazy looking solar technology and what do you think about it? let us know on the comments and don't forget to hit subscribe because we have more videos like this for you. every friday, the the learning curve of the digital age. why handwriting is crucial for childhood development.

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board is what makes things to the way they are mapped out. navigating a changing world. now on youtube, the to choose and send and emoji to someone you only need thumbs. but writing with a pen or pencil involves the entire hand. it's a veritable anatomical wonder made up of 27 different bones. a perfect multi functional tool with close ties to the brain. writing things out by hand, improve. recall how come that topic and much more this week on dw science program tomorrow today. welcome to the show, the.