
Heliogen’s new tech could unlock renewable energy for industrial manufacturing - redm
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/19/heliogens-new-technology-could-unlock-renewable-energy-for-industrial-manufacturing/
======
nikhizzle
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?

~~~
woodandsteel
This article explains the technology in much more detail

[https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2019/11/19/20970252/c...](https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2019/11/19/20970252/climate-change-solar-heat-heliogen-csp)

~~~
Animats
That's kind of neat. Just four cameras near the target point, watching the
spillover from each mirror of the mirror array, and adjusting each mirror.

Keeping the cameras from being blinded by direct hits during startup and
adjustment might be a problem. They probably have to start with all mirrors
off-target and bring them onto target one at a time.

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eloff
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.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Cement markets are pretty local. It's cheap enough to manufacture and the raw
materials are so abundant that it doesn't make sense to transport cement long
distances.

~~~
eloff
If this were a big enough cost advantage, suddenly it might make sense to
transport over longer distances. Putting the carbon saved back into the
process. The law of unintended consequences is a harsh mistress.

~~~
wmf
Transportation has to become more expensive in the green future so that pushes
back towards local manufacturing.

~~~
kragen
Why? Can't everything become cheaper in the green future?

~~~
wmf
In the long term it may be cheaper once ground transportation is fully
electrified and air is running on carbon-neutral synthetic fuels. During the
transition period I would expect transportation to be more expensive.

~~~
kragen
Why? Won't the advent of carbon-neutral synthetic fuels made with abundant
solar energy (whether PV or thermal) start lowering the price of ICE-driven
transport? What likely events would happen in the interim to raise the prices
higher?

~~~
wmf
I predict that a carbon tax (or something similar) would motivate replacement
of all ICE ground vehicles with battery electric before carbon capture becomes
cheap. Then later when synthetic fuels arrive they'll only be used by
airplanes. It's possible technologies could arrive in a different order
though.

~~~
kragen
Oh, yeah, a carbon tax would certainly make it more expensive to run ICE
ground vehicles. I don't think of that as a "technology" though.

When you say, "when synthetic fuels arrive", do you mean the Fischer-Tropsch
process developed during World War I? I think that's the most likely candidate
process for synfuels. It's reasonably efficient but it uses a lot of energy,
because fuels contain a lot of energy — that's why we use them. By coincidence
last week I read a bunch of papers by Heather Willauer et al. of NRL about
producing synfuels with Fischer-Tropsch from seawater, using an electrolytic
acidification process with cation exchange to drive CO₂ out of the water and
generate the requisite hydrogen at the same time. The paper with the most
comprehensive workout of the costs was ECONOMIC COMPARISONS OF LITTORAL
PRODUCTION OF LOW CARBON FUEL FROM NON-FOSSIL ENERGY SOURCES AND SEAWATER,
from 2017. You should read it if you're interested in the topic!

------
themaninthedark
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Solar_power_tower)

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

~~~
tlb
I think the challenge is that when the sun is variable, you have to constantly
regulate the manufacturing process to get consistent output. You have to see
clouds coming and scale back the feed rate of whatever material you're heating
in advance.

~~~
trianglem
What do you mean by the sun being variable? Don’t we already know where the
sun is going to be at anytime for the entire year?

~~~
tlb
Clouds.

~~~
trianglem
Right, but if there are clouds in the way there’s not a lot that you can do.

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scythe
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.

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RosanaAnaDana
This smacks of a manufactured PR piece.

~~~
semiotagonal
> ...the serial entrepreneur and investor.

I still don't understand the virtue of being a "serial entrepreneur",
especially with no indication of what businesses were created. It just sounds
like someone who bailed on several previous companies that aren't even worth
mentioning.

~~~
adventured
> I still don't understand the virtue of being a "serial entrepreneur",
> especially with no indication of what businesses were created.

They certainly should have elaborated a bit. It's Bill Gross from Idealab. He
has a long entrepreneurial history and quite mixed record of meaningful
successes and spectacular failures.

"Prior to Idealab, Gross founded GNP Loudspeakers (now GNP Audio Video), an
audio equipment manufacturer; GNP Development Inc., acquired by Lotus
Software; and Knowledge Adventure, an educational software company, later
acquired by Cendant."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_T._Gross](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_T._Gross)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealab)

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jaynetics
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.)

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jeffreyrogers
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.

~~~
Zenst
You also tend to have higher air pressure in hot sunny area's needed for this
tech and that will also increase the melting point of iron. So whilst a small
detail, certain one that would be measurable on running costs/energy needed.

~~~
tlb
The melting point of iron doesn't depend noticeably on pressure with the range
of atmospheric pressures, as you can see from the flat lines in the phase
diagram at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron#/media/File:Pure_iron_pha...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron#/media/File:Pure_iron_phase_diagram_\(EN\).png)

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

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daedalus2027
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.

~~~
kragen
Photons don't carry entropy, creating more entropy is easy, and hotter doesn't
mean more entropy. However, you're correct that you can't reach temperatures
higher than the surface of the sun by concentrating sunlight (because that
would _destroy_ some entropy), and that you need millions of degrees for an
appreciable rate of fusion.

Hope this helps.

------
kragen
Solar furnaces
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_furnace](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...](https://www.geekwire.com/2019/company-backed-bill-gates-claims-
breakthrough-concentrated-solar-energy-promising-replace-fossil-fuels-
industrial-plants/)

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.

~~~
gamblor956
The wikipedia article you linked doesn't actually reference any supposed solar
furnaces capable of reaching or exceeding 1000 celsius. Even the project
linked in the 1000 celsius bullet point states it only reaches approximately
500 celsius on its own wikipedia page (and at the project's own website).

Note, importantly, as with all things scale matters. There are solar furnaces
the size of a pot that have reached 3000 celsius or more. This is not very
useful for _industrial_ scale activities.

Presumably one of the breakthroughs is that Heliogen can achieve 1000 celsius
_at an industrial scale_ which is not something that appears to have been done
before with purely solar energy.

~~~
kragen
> _The wikipedia[sic] article you linked doesn 't actually reference any
> supposed[sic] solar furnaces capable of reaching or exceeding 1000
> celsius[sic]._

It does; it references the one at Odeillo, which exceeds 3000°, according to
this open-access paper by one of its instigators:
[https://journals.openedition.org/histoire-
cnrs/2661](https://journals.openedition.org/histoire-cnrs/2661) This "supposed
solar furnace", as you term it, finished construction in 1969 and receives
75,000 visitors per year.

> _Presumably one of the breakthroughs is that Heliogen can achieve 1000
> celsius[sic]_ at an industrial scale _which is not something that appears to
> have been done before with purely solar energy._

The question of "scale" is essentially one of power — the press release
explains that you can expect about one megawatt per acre (250 MW/km² in modern
units), and contemplates that you might want to build plants that scale up to
_two_ megawatts. To me, that sounds pretty small for industrial scale, but the
Odeillo solar furnace is already one megawatt.

Why power rather than volume? Well, you can heat an arbitrarily large or small
thing to an arbitrarily high temperature with an arbitrarily large or small
amount of power if it's well enough insulated, and modern insulation is very
good. But if your heating doesn't have enough power, it will be very slow on a
large amount of material, and if it's fighting things like endothermic
chemical reactions, it may lose.

Heliogen's press release explains that their pilot plant has 400 mirrors on
two acres, so it's probably about two megawatts — twice the size of the 3500°
Odeillo, but much lower temperature, and a tiny fraction of the size of
existing commercial CSP plants, which run around 600° as explained earlier.

~~~
gamblor956
I think you're ignoring a key point of Heliogen's design function. Heliogen is
designed to be used _directly_ as the furnace in industrial applications for
making steel, cement, etc.

The Odeillo solar furnace can reach higher temperatures but can't _transmit_
them--it can only heat steam, which is a poor transmitter of heat energy to
industrial materials.

Ideally, both of these designs would be incorporated together--one to drive
the machinery (the Odeillo design) and the other to do the actual physical
_work_ of heating the materials (the Heliogen design).

~~~
kragen
There's nothing to suggest that Heliogen's design is in any way particularly
suitable for transmitting heat to somewhere else or for putting a cement kiln
or blast furnace at the focus of the mirrors. On the contrary, their pilot
plant sites the focus at the top of a tall tower, like many existing CSP power
plants, which is a particularly inconvenient place to put a cement kiln,
though not unheard of.

For driving machinery you probably want lower temperatures, like the 600°
existing coal, nuclear, and CSP power plants use for driving machinery. Coal
and nuclear plants could easily generate higher temperatures, but there are a
variety of practical difficulties that arise.

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

------
hirundo
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.

~~~
AndrewDucker
Sounds a lot more complex than "strap grenade to drone, with actuator to pull
pin", and no more effective.

~~~
hirundo
Sunlight is easier to source than explosives.

------
microdrum
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...](https://enphase.com/en-us/ensemble-technology-enphase-installers)

------
donaldcuckman
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.

------
kumarski
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.

------
kumarski
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.

------
dev_dull
> _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.

~~~
gnode
While there are many benefits to nuclear power, this quote is at odds with
your comment. Nuclear power suffers a low Carnot efficiency (around 30-40%),
as it has an even lower operating temperature than the criticised old CSP
design. While nuclear reactors can get arbitrarily hot, practical and safety
considerations limit current designs to relatively low (and thus inefficient)
temperatures.

Nuclear is also less practical for direct industrial use or distributed
deployment because of safety concerns, with only a few exceptional cases like
military marine propulsion.

~~~
cromwellian
The OP also ignores the staggering cost to commission _and_ decommission a
nuclear plant. Costs to decommission alone are $1-4 billion.

Solar can be deployed quicker, cheaper, and faster for anyone without access
to a decade timespan and a billions of dollars of capital.

------
drp3pp3r
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.

