of dreams coming through, making money, having a sun when not, feels injunction stops september 19th on dw, the since time immemorial. humans have been using the fire for cooking and heating, and more recently to power heavy machinery. the funding would colon oil emits toxic pollutants, and i love to c o 2 watts. if we've been iron instead, but hang on a minute can ion then the come, the melted of course and cast into all sorts of shapes and sizes. what is it also combustible? as a few tricky down along with other fascinating ideas to the energy of the future on this edition of tomorrow. today, the science show on dw what's burning here is the

firewall to be precise. this isn't something you see every day. everyone on eyes and things stomach walk into iran. we don't expect to see a burning does this, but it can burn as long as the surface area is big enough. when the iron is in powdered form, the surface area is even larger. when i did the for, to mention burner deliveries, basically the energy couldn't speed it up and we need that energy to ignite the iron powder and making her to, to stomach when iron combust. the left over product is iron oxide or red. it's a chemical reaction that can soon revolutionize how energy is stored. in the clean circles project scientist at the technical university of thompson, i have teamed up with other partners to study how are in special properties could be put to you the these pure iron particles are

a lot of energy. when iron reacts with oxygen in the air, deforms and iron oxide, we know is run the this combustion reaction is excess 30, meaning it releases heat and that he can be put to use the seen this quick to the goal or the product. we'll just use iron as a storage medium for renewable energy rise, and iron can also be stored and transported. so the energy it contains can be put to use and at a later point i want to spend on site. and then let's this kind of energy storage technology could spark a green revolution. but if we make the switch to renewables, what will happen when there's no wind and the sun isn't shining? where will our energy come from? the standard energy storage systems like batteries can't meet that need. but iron powder could be just the ticket. iron is

a cheap and abundant metal. and when iron powder conduct, it releases energy without releasing harmful particulate and without c o 2 emissions. what's more, the entire process also works in reverse. when iron oxide is put into an aqueous solution and an electric current flows through a process called electrolysis takes place. the iron and oxygen are split in a process close reduction. that leaves behind the elemental iron, it looks the electricity is stored is chemical energy the. this process of converting iron to iron oxide and back to higher and again, can be repeated almost indefinitely. and iron powder also has other advantages as an energy carrier shows are you going to need to flush it for to say you have a one liter bottle of compressed hydrogen of to another and

a one liter bottle of iron powder filters that bottle of hydrogen could supply a 3 person household with 2 hours of energy, no more than that, the iron hunger could supply almost 2 days of energy, which the miser stop can up to a target. researchers from the clean circles project or studying the underlying processes that take place when iron powder is combusted. for now, a gas flame is used to make diaries in the future. the goal is to make the process of sustaining the exhaust gas is reminiscent of a rocket engine. the research here is focused on the fundamentals, like how large the particles shipping and how against the iron powder should be to ensure uniform and complete combustion. together with the students because again, hudson is using a flow simulator to model the processes that take place in the span of just micro seconds when because i as in particular cold iron target the flow in from

below and they combust at the current done. they heat up and transmit that. you've got the gas, so was that red shell, or you can see right there still supposed to be a high symbol. the energy originally stored in the iron particles is transmitted to the gases heat. and can now be honest in a power plant, for example, this hits somebody should be caustic with these complex calculations and flow simulations can only be done on very powerful computers. the university's mainframe is up to the top. it's one of the 10 most powerful computers in germany. i'm in the large facilities power plant and include cheap, the best possible efficiency, implementation, and utilization of the storage, renewable energy and the cost of the test that shows us the university's model power plant. this one megawatt plants could supply about 100 households with energy right now. other energy carriers are being invested here for research purposes. put

soon they plan to start testing iron counter design. yeah. yeah. i'm here, i'm can see a flame that's burning and is setup similar to a coal fired plant. and if we feed iron into it, those particles are similar. and they would also burn and release heat in which we use to generate and steam in a steam turbine that team would be converted to electricity. it's the same principle as using call. so coal fired power plants could also be operated with iron powder and retrofitting coal fired plants would be relatively easy. and siri, whole power plants around the world can be converted to iron combustion plants and generate power without emitting any c o 2. that's what's inside of the folders for them to solicited. potentially low carpet questions by up to 30 percent. and of course that can't happen over night. it's a system, but finding a renewable energy carrier that could replace cool without emitting c o 2. couldn't massively flash global carpet emissions mostly so that sounds amazing. but where

with the huge amounts of renewable energy needed to keep the cycle going come from . that's one of the issues michelle cannot co spokesperson at the clean circles project is investigating. and then this is the thing, so we're set to roughly double our energy consumption by installing heat panels. i'm driving electric car, that's called a con. luckily generated renewables can't meet that need to know. so we have to store renewable energy, where i produce, obviously for this a lot of fun and wind and then transported to europe and germany on something. this is where international energy partnerships could come in. countries that have plenty of wind and sun and that are politically and economically stable and like canada and australia, a good prospect. other possibilities including the media in southern africa and she lives in south america. the green renewable energy would be produced in large amounts locally and stored in iron as an energy carrier that would then be shipped

to germany and transported, for example, by rail to where it's needed. as the hotels for the tiny little process isn't the main channel charge of things that leaving the main challenge will be garnering political support for this new technology come. so that can be launched on the market and often side to then we'll meet enough robots to energy partnerships oxy. to provide us with the renewable energy. we need all the and low bond and it can suffer from home. replacing our coal fired plants with iron carrier technology would require more higher and of course, but the research has done the math and the extra amount is less than one right. thanks to convert to iron carrier technology on a global scale. we need to mind just 5 percent more iron or over the next 2 decades . so all goes well the 1st coal fire plants can be converted to green iron by 2030

instead of relying on combustion, we can assume hahn is energy from the sun. thinks of all take solar panels already generate about 5 percent of the world's electricity. but there's another way to turn this tends energy into electricity with myra's a lot of myra's. and it's not as new as you might think. check out 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 lea 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 us are for families. and that's what arrival technology came into play. large mirror us 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 back then. but skipped to today, and it's been almost completely forgot. but maybe that was a mistake, because concentrated solar can do one very crucial thing that solar cells con, oh, you might just seen the concentrated solar power or c is p plants that looks like this before. especially if you into your hollywood, sy fi the. see if the ponds can also look a bit less futuristic like this, but fundamentally they work the same way, but use a mirror us to, reflects and concentrate sunlight. is the good, i mean, did the sheet that is coming from this, i need to show the consenting uh,

the use of the 1000 times to send united lucky, bubbling. and this type of csp plans for that particular point is would be the top of the tower inside it, there's a fluid, purely molten salt. so salt and it's a liquid form that gets heated up by the sun's energy molten sold as then compounds with 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 cost, you know, i'm not a small, uh, let's say the flushing problem. but we solve the problem, even any portion of after that the salt has cooled down, so it gets pumped up, the towel 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, 0. so we built super optimistic about solar at the industries to generation. bank them that, well, for example, big dreams to set up huge, concentrated solar plans in this a higher um and send the 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, mainly policy support which click started, the growing solar industry concentrated solar power also became cheaper. about $102011.00, 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. it wasn't so much that solar panels last it was 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 of 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. it's have to clean it maybe from time to time, but it's not operationally complex as csp where you have a mirror that you need to adjust to, you know, under real environmental conditions. these plans 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 of points. this make

a project. welcome to the future of power generation, crescent dunes in the us state of nevada and was suppose to revolutionize clean electricity. the cost of all things, $1000000000.00 to build and when it started to run and 2015 expectations were high . and then the problems began and never reached its expected everett's 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 sold. 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 he doesn't have bolton. so any boy you have started salt, and then your pipes are full of solid sold. and this is a big pain sort out of a mega projects like the idea to build big plants. and this, a higher up to power 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 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar panels out there. so c,

p is never made it big, and it's seen it's fast share of 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 years. because that's one thing that affordable takes come to think about virtual techs is it really does not generate that night, but concentrates of sola can new of plants don't just heat hot, multiple salt or you straight away. they also have big tanks to store it. once it stops or don't you close by one degree celsius per day in that and can be used to run the turbine. it's a lights up point like after the sun has gone 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 plaque, more renewables into our grids because they only work in the sunshine. so the wind blows. having this flexible supply might also justify paying a little more for the future of csp, move to a different, nice right side 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 farms. that 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 and salt is quite cheap, it's more economical to use this for longer periods. it's also possible to use electricity from solar panels to heat up the molten salts, but that's less efficient than directly using csp to capture the sun's heat. at least in places with lots of sunshine, good reasons to rediscover, concentrated solar power in china. the around 30 plants and development way more than anywhere else. that's because every renewable pack with one giga with capacity now must include to send 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. either way csp will likely never get as big as people one still templates solar cells have one the technology res, and catch at the mass market. let's see a speed might've fountain unique and it will be exciting to see whether it can phillips it's all good to know more about so la powell will have another science question. send it to us as a video, text or voice mail, if we on. so we're going to show, we'll send you a little surprised, so thank you. so go on. just ask this weeks you a question, came from alex in kind of id and be used for rockets. you got some fascinating question including correct, but it's in the fields. real kits can lift off from

a launch pad because the rocket fuel burns that releases a huge amount of energy. the whole gas expelled down which generates thrust unless the rock it off the ground. it takes about 8 minutes to reach out to space but satellite in space permissions take a lot longer than that and they need to use as little fuel as possible. that's where i adding comes in as a possible propellant for electric motors. since 1998 space propes, i've also had this kind of propulsion system, an ion engine on board. in these systems, the fuel isn't fund like a real kids, but electrically charged the propeller and ask them to split into electrically charged particles. and then exhilarated in an electrostatic field, the then they're rejected from the thrust to propel the space croft. electric propulsion systems are very

efficient and becoming increasingly popular. they don't produce a lot of thrust, but they operate for a long time. that makes them ideal for long distance space travel. so maneuvering spacecraft with high precision the systems are generally powered with neutral gases, likes in on crypt on which are expensive and very rare. that's why scientists look control time. this is a few years ago, a french company tested the propulsion system based on sunday dieting. iodine is cheaper and even more efficient than rad noble gases. norwegian, many such a light launched in april 2023 as an id electric propulsion system on board. so it's entirely possible that one day space cross my user id and propulsion systems to make the journey to moss and to asteroids. the european and us

space agencies are also investigating input to propulsion systems, fuel biology. let's head back to, to this aisha region that struggles the border between germany and poland. for more than 150 years, mcknight or brown coal was mine to now the landscape is being returned to nature. solar and wind farms are moving in with new ideas about how to hon is power from this guy. the welcome to what's probably the world's tallest measurement tower. it's 300 meters high. it's part of the plan to transform the potential of wind energy, the wisdom, and the more know you wind turbine operates at about 25 percent full load hours. and if you make all that, so be so for megawatt wind turbine would generate roughly the same amount of energy

as a one, megawatt cole or gas power plant for the spring. so i'm good with we knew that we could get more out of it in there. but we didn't know how much of it must must. that's where the wind measurement tower comes in. you can. now we know that the same rotor diameter at 300 meters to generate about twice as much energy. all right . and we realize that these towers are so tongue that we could install them and existing wind farms is a kind of 2nd story. we will proceed in the event of a long but not on the same turbine, of course. but in between them, us on the and well, that's the reason it doesn't cost 9 and his team began working on their dream of a high altitude wind turbine in 2010. this wind benjamin tower, which was built about a year ago, is the 4 runner of what to expect to become a gigantic project. the data it's been supplying so it has strong and steady. the wind is twice the height of a conventional wind turbine. in the future, high altitude wind turbines could accelerate the expansion of wind energy cost. i

thought i hadn't. one of the biggest hurdles a space at the moment is finding a net sites for wind farms. if you fall off in the approval and regional planning processes, the suitability studies, but can we understand that this allows us to use existing wind farms which have already been found suitable for generating wind direction. and the trends or something that could give a huge boost to the expansion of wind power in the next years nation. you also because we would be spending $35.00 or 7 years going through the approval process for the hours rising from 2nd reading. i'm getting cutting, identifying new locations as one side of the equation. the other is that the newest and tallest wind turbines are starting to bump against our physical limits. in terms of transporting the enormous rotor plates and in terms of the height of the structure. but was especially develop construction method. wind turbines could reach a height of 300 meters, a listen to this group phone. so it's

a telescope in tower inventory. we 1st build the outer tower and then the inside temper debina. we attached the rotor and turbine itself at the regular height, say 150 meters of the inventory. and then we push the inter tower up and tell us got the fashion doesn't we don't we decided to use a regular lot of for trust construction, which you also see and electrical towers that's done. but there's need for state of the art easy to build a new and has less wind resistance been foster. we also use commercially available blades and turbines from a system. so we joined together several state of the art technology is to arrive at a new technology and this to 9 to get took on the entrepreneur as passionate about the future of high altitude wind turbines. they'll operate at more than 50 percent full load hours and combined with conventional wind turbines and solar installations. stomach optimum use the space. the idea is definitely appealing, combining 3 renewable energy sources into

a single hybrid power plant to deliver enough green energy to meet demand. and we'll have enough on they sleep on they so. so we hope that next year or the year after that we'll build the 1st pilot plant and environmentally friendly, hybrid power plant coordinate and like useful. so if i can produce locally generated green energy, which would attract jobs and businesses of the area like i've been homeless, acceptance with for construction is set to begin on the world's 1st high altitude wind turbine. and then we'll say she region and eastern germany. people have already been won over to the idea of setting up wind farms and former open catholic night mines. the mayor of the local community is convinced green wind energy will soon replace dirty like night or brown. cool. and then you also have like acceptance remain strong and if local citizens also profit from the wind park, the next ty altitude, wind turbine will only be a matter of time until noon. volume insights at the local community of chicago is

already reaping the benefits from a nearby energy park every 2 years. each resident receives 80 years as part of the profit sharing scheme and half of the business tax revenue flows back into the community. and you find that for a ticket that i own, we already started seeing returns 3 years ago when we built a preschool in the ship county district for more than a 1000000 euro. with why on the student 2 years ago we expanded the school with 6 new classroom life, also for over a 1000000 year of public schools. last year we built the school cafeteria for another 1000000 pits, and we also renovated all the playgrounds in the area. and today we're opening the new skate park here, which cost about $300000.00 bureau. some of those old ship cal will soon be home to record breaking wind turbine. and the mayor is convinced another will find them as for you can cost money. he plans to build 1000 high altitude wind turbines and existing wind farms across germany by 2030

and that wraps things up for this edition of tomorrow today. thanks for watching and see you again next time the the,

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. this is dw news live and from berlin, towns and cities across central europe, evacuating residents as the worst floods in decades continue to hit the region. at least 17 people have been killed in the funding so far in many more are missing authorities or warning that the worst may be yet to come. also coming up from one extreme to the next to severe droughts or fueling wild flyers in portugal in spain . at least 3 people have died and firefighters are racing to save homes. and could he be the next chancellor of germany? the countries conservatives are bidding on. frederick merrick.