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This Billion Dollar Solar Plant was an EPIC Failure

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this video is sponsored by lutema more on that  in a little bit we've talked about solar energy a  

hundred times on this channel but every time we do  we typically talk about photovoltaic the process  

of taking in photons from sunlight knocking  out electrons in a semiconductor and harnessing  

electricity but there's actually another way  to produce electricity from the sun and that  

is a solar thermal energy plant so one company had  the crazy idea of actually building a large-scale  

power plant in just this way in the high desert  of nevada unfortunately nevada's crescent tuned  

solar thermal plant failed just a few years after  they started what the heck happened was this just  

a bad idea or was there a timing involved or  some other aspect to the technology that we  

could learn from we thought this epic failure  deserved a deeper dive today on twitter davinci

anybody who lives in southern california if you've  driven to vegas recently you know that huge solar  

farm with mirrors everywhere yeah that's crescent  dune i've seen it so many times and i wondered  

how they were doing i figured they were doing well  turns out not so much startup energy venture solar  

reserve backed by a handful of renewable energy  investment groups and a sizeable bump from the  

us government set out to develop what was going to  be promised as a truly remarkable breakthrough in  

energy production and storage we'll get to that  the project as you mentioned wasn't just another  

solar farm idea but a concentrated solar power  plant with a central receiver tower and advanced  

molten salt energy storage technology so what  exactly makes this kind of power plant different  

remember when you were a kid you had a magnifying  glass and you try to burn ants or in my case  

burn initials on like a wooden fence well that  is pretty much the idea the crescent dunes plant  

was located about 200 miles northwest of las  vegas it featured over 10 000 movable motorized  

mirrors called heliostats each heliostat is  made up of 35 6 feet by six feet mirror facets  

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