Name: The Solar Power Towers of Southern Spain
Uploaded: 2020-04-01T01:10:37.000Z
Duration: 2 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

These are the solar power towers of southern Spain.

This is one of the sunniest parts of Europe,

and these were two of the first solar towers ever built.

Almost 2,000 heliostats, movable mirrors,

constantly reflect the sun onto the towers, heating up water into steam,

and powering a turbine to generate electricity.

you'll see quite a few documentaries who've gotten a tour around there,

who've been incredibly impressed by the technology,

and who've been selling them as the future of power generation.

the technology behind them is both very clever and very simple:

it's like bothering your teacher with the sunlight reflection off your phone,

When these were built, Spain was in boom times,

Investors loved it and piled in with their own money,

companies and researchers were happy to set up all sorts of things like this,

and suddenly the Spanish government had many times the amount of solar power they'd planned for...

not just for the plants that were under construction,

but even for the plants that were already built

and relying on those subsidies to balance the books.

The industry got cold feet: Spain had altered the deal,

and all the solar companies could do was pray they didn't alter it any further.

This might still have been viable, maybe,

just normal solar panels, the sort that you can fit to your house

or that get put out in massive fields as solar farms,

converting sunlight directly to electricity.

Whether the price of those panels is going to keep falling

depends on which team of researchers you believe,

but it's already cheaper than building a giant tower,

putting in either high pressure water or molten salt for it to heat,

and dealing with thousands of moving parts that all have to line up and track the sun

and which might, occasionally, cook a few birds in mid-flight.

Don't get me wrong, this is a great bit of technology on paper.

It combines renewable energy with storage:

if you're heating up something like molten salt,

you can save that power for hours to get you through the night.

And there are other plants like it being built:

there's one nearly completed in the Atacama Desert in South America.

if research had poured into these instead of regular solar panels: but as it is,

the future probably isn't quite this bright.