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These are the solar power towers of southern Spain.
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This is one of the sunniest parts of Europe,
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and these were two of the first solar towers ever built.
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Almost 2,000 heliostats, movable mirrors,
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constantly reflect the sun onto the towers, heating up water into steam,
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and powering a turbine to generate electricity.
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And if you look online,
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you'll see quite a few documentaries who've gotten a tour around there,
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who've been incredibly impressed by the technology,
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and who've been selling them as the future of power generation.
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And these are impressive.
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Not just visually,
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the technology behind them is both very clever and very simple:
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it's like bothering your teacher with the sunlight reflection off your phone,
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just on a much, much bigger scale.
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But there is a catch.
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When these were built, Spain was in boom times,
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and heavily subsidising solar power.
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Investors loved it and piled in with their own money,
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companies and researchers were happy to set up all sorts of things like this,
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and suddenly the Spanish government had many times the amount of solar power they'd planned for...
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and they had to subsidise all of it.
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And then the financial crash hit.
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The Spanish government cut subsidies.
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Not just for the future,
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not just for the plants that were under construction,
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but even for the plants that were already built
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and relying on those subsidies to balance the books.
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The industry got cold feet: Spain had altered the deal,
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and all the solar companies could do was pray they didn't alter it any further.
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Or go bankrupt, one of the two.
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This might still have been viable, maybe,
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with some more research and development,
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and that's what they were trying to do.
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But now, the cost of regular,
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everyday solar panels is tumbling.
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Not mirrors, not like this,
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just normal solar panels, the sort that you can fit to your house
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or that get put out in massive fields as solar farms,
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converting sunlight directly to electricity.
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Whether the price of those panels is going to keep falling
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depends on which team of researchers you believe,
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but it's already cheaper than building a giant tower,
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putting in either high pressure water or molten salt for it to heat,
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and dealing with thousands of moving parts that all have to line up and track the sun
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perfectly
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and which might, occasionally, cook a few birds in mid-flight.
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Don't get me wrong, this is a great bit of technology on paper.
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It combines renewable energy with storage:
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if you're heating up something like molten salt,
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you can save that power for hours to get you through the night.
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And there are other plants like it being built:
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there's one nearly completed in the Atacama Desert in South America.
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But right now,
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this is expensive.
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It might not have been,
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if history had taken a different track,
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if research had poured into these instead of regular solar panels: but as it is,
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the future probably isn't quite this bright.
