as of the global issues, land on the desk of his presidency. for now after shore, and frankly w split at a climate change program, takes a look at costs and traded solar energy state. you to find out more article for these things. these ones so much for watching the living planet, dw podcast. how to make greener choices in your everyday lives. but honestly try to do the working 32 hours a week to be better for the assignments and 40. but of course we shouldn't be 90 the. the living scientists just had subscribe, whatever you listen to about costs, and the discovery would change your mind just to click away, find out best documentary on you to see the world,

the subscribe. know to dw documentary, 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, 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 mirror us that's can also twin sunbeams into electricity by focusing the light from the sun and using it's 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 beg events, but skipped to today. and it's been almost completely forgot the story behind it. this one of great expectations your queen 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 csp plants that looks like this before. especially if you into your hollywood, sy fi the steep 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, reflects and concentrate some lights. it's cheap. they could, i mean, did that, shouldn't that, that is coming from this. i, you know, this is chevy,

a lot of who call themselves a csp evangelist. he's a mechanical engineer who's worked on many concentrated solar projects around the world, showed up on something i read about the 1000 times this on the not talk about point . and this type of csp plants, that particular point would be the top of the tower. inside it, there's a fluid, purely molten salt, sol, solved. and it's liquid form that gets heated up by the sun's energy. the hot mountain sold has been pumped down to a 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 but one time, but we solve the problem, even any function uh flow. after that, the salt has cooled down, so it gets pumped up, the tower and the cycle stops again. for this process to work properly, do you need a lot of direct sunlight, which is why you find some plants and countries like chilly morocco,

the united arab emirates, or india. but most of them on the hot pots of spain and the us. so why is it that when we hear solar energy, most of us immediately think of photovoltaics solar cells and not mirrors, but concentrate sunlight? i'm old enough to remember in 2010, 0, so we will su pops domestic about solar time on editors to generation to any. chase is a solar analyst at the energy research from bluebook any? yes. back then that, well, for example, big dreams to set up huge, concentrated solar plans in this a hot rock 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. it got pretty cheap. 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 come with them in this

video to check out after this concentrated solar power also became she talked about 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 that sold it apple last. it was one of the federal types, one that is also because with solar fennel or concentrate to the solar, every single mirror needs to individually track 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 talent which needs to stay within a fixed range compared to all 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 power technology and policy for the last decade. it's just

sitting there and patrick came in, 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. csb 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 was supposed to revolutionize clean electricity, the cost of all things, $1000000000.00 to build, and when it started to run in 2015 expectations were high. and then the problems began. 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. so 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 anymore 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 plants have to shut down for 8 months on and another time. but most of the sold think leaked and the ground got contaminated, so the entire tower had to be taken down. the funds eventually closed and 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, do operations, and maintain and spend the night spending that it. it takes some time, crescent dunes generates 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 of

a mega projects like the idea to build big plants and 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 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar panels out there sees p is never made it big, and it's 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 of plants don't just heat up multiple sold to you straight away. they also have big tanks to store it once it salts. it only codes by one degree celsius per day in that and can be used to run the turbine at the lights up points 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 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 red side. it used to be a power technology like wind, mtv. and now it's really very much a storage technology. there of course, 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 what the 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 seats at least the sizes with lots of sunshine. c. c has been in the doldrums for about 6 they use because we lost the dice on energy about the realities for the provision of not on

the special energy with days of state. nothing. that's the street. this is craig, what's the ceo? a fast company that's working on new designs to fix the problems concentrated solar power them had in the past. we yeah. now system, you know, we have solar family, nice hot, sunny places you end up needing to the fossil fuels. so they're not from energy. they already built a small demonstration plant and eastern australia to prove that technology works. the next step is to be able to pick up one with 8 hours of storage. this report by the us national renewable energy and the board tree. so if that's the manual, it was compiled after the failure of crescent units and analyzes all the problems. it's and other sees the plants and counted and that's, that's really critical because um, you know, it's, you can't learn from the mistakes of the past and there's not really a siege 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 sold the fast enough, the only ones that took an interest in the csp reports that become the the chinese use. be engineer, come book like that above. what has now changed? every thing for it sees p at the moment is that china is, you know, getting into a big, china is re discovery and concentrated solar power around 30 plants and development labels than anywhere else. that's because every renewable talked with one people with 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 concentrated,

sold out. so he talked to storage times. when at nights when the solar panels lie idle, you use the stored hate to run your turbine. so what does this mean for concentrated solar kinds of technology? really state you come back? well, a lot depends on whether china sold a tile us become a success. and a sort of a tower been 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, that the supply chain gains from china really enables or a cheaper or better at products that will be available books also in other countries and, and africa potentially in europe 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 supports and will be hard for csp to get off the ground again. either way,

it would likely never get us because people ones thought it was sold, a sales have one the technology rates and catch at the mass market. but speed might've fountain unique and it will be exciting to see whether it can phillips the heads you ever heard about this crazy looking solar technology. and what do you think about it? let us know the comments and don't forget to hit subscribe because we have more videos like this for you. every friday we the truly ride guides know the way around is strictly scientific trip

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look. it's karen who use events analyzed by experts and critical thinking is. this is with the weekdays on dw, the heading to a primeval forest. but it's not a tropical jungle or the amazon rain forest. we're in europe. a continent once blanketed in primeval forest, 6000 years ago about 80 percent of it was covered and treat most of those for a 2nd. but a few primary force remains and there a paradise for ecologists and other scientists. all this and more about trees and forest on this edition of the w science show. welcome to tomorrow today who the fog a russian mountains in room.