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What is the point of this precise concentrating of light? Heat!
Conventional CSP towers can only get to about 560 degrees Celsius — enough to boil fluid and run a turbine, but not much else. Heliogen’s towers have reached just over 1,000° C and the company believes with further improvements it can hit 1,500° C. That would be a whole new ball game.
High-temperature heat opens up enormous markets for concentrating solar
There are lots of industrial processes that can use 1,000° C heat, like steam reforming of methane. And as that heat creeps higher, it becomes useful for more and more processes, from cement to steel.
When the temperature hits 1,500° C, it opens up something of a holy grail: direct, thermochemical generation of liquid fuels that can substitute for any hydrocarbon fuel.
Huh? Let me explain, as this is a relatively new engineering development, being perfected by Swedish researchers as we speak. It goes like this: a new, state-of-the-art material called ceria (CeO2) is heated to about 1,500° C, at which point it releases a pure stream of oxygen. Then, at about 1,000° C, water and carbon dioxide are introduced. The ceria wants its oxygen back, so it breaks the water and carbon dioxide up into hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and oxygen, and absorbs the oxygen. What’s left is a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, otherwise known as “syngas.”
Basically, you start with H2O + CO2 and you end up with a mix of H + CO. As it happens, every hydrocarbon (fossil) fuel in the world, from kerosene to gasoline, from boat fuel to jet fuel, is built around some combination of H and CO, which means synfuel can be refined into any fuel, for any purpose. If the CO2 that feeds into the process is drawn from the ambient air via direct air capture (DAC), which is still a big if for now, then the resulting fuels can be said to be carbon-neutral, a huge improvement on the carbon-intensive fuels now in use.
Cumulatively, these markets for carbon-free industrial heat — steam reforming of methane, cement, steel, synthetic liquid fuels, and more — are enormous, up to a trillion dollars globally, and represent around a fifth of global GHG emissions. They include almost all the most difficult-to-decarbonize sectors.
Heliogen may or may not succeed, but it has a genuine innovation
Obviously, Heliogen’s technology can’t work with every industrial facility. For one thing, Gross estimates that only about half of them worldwide have the land necessary to build a solar-heat facility on site. Facilities would have to integrate what is effectively an airborne oven into their process flow. And every facility would still need backup sources of heat, since the sun is only out for eight hours a day.
Until the technology is proven in a commercial setting, it’s difficult to say much about the real-world performance and costs, so there’s no way to know whether or how much Heliogen may succeed. Though it is stocked with talent and well-funded — Bill Gates said he is “pleased to be an early backer” of what he called “a promising development in the quest to one day replace fossil fuel” — it faces the same difficult hurdles as any startup. Most of them die.
Still, whatever its fate, Heliogen is something fairly rare in the world of technology: a genuine innovation. And it’s a great application of Gross’s insight, for which I have become something of an evangelist, namely that the clean-energy transition is going to proceed in large part by substituting computing power for material and labor, i.e., intelligence for stuff.
The ongoing explosion in computing power — AI, machine learning, ubiquitous real-time sensing, and all the rest of it — is going to enable innovations in energy that we can’t begin to predict. It will make our renewable energy technologies more responsive to real-time variations in sun and wind, more able to continuously adapt. It will make our cars and buildings smarter, more able to exchange energy. It will enable the electricity system to decentralize and maximize local resources. And the computing power we have today will look primitive by 2030.
That’s one reason the clean-energy transition is going to happen faster than energy transitions of the past: It will be aided and accelerated by computing power, an extension of our imaginations and inventive powers that is new in all of history.
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