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
yielding a heliostat overall usable area of 1200 square feet and the total solar field aperture
added up to about 12 million square feet each one of these mirrors is fine-tuned to balance incoming
solar radiation to a mathematically precise angle to hit the exact spot on the top of the tower
containing a molten salt solution the combined concentrated solar energy can reach temperatures
of upwards of one thousand degrees fahrenheit csps concentrated solar power are generally considered
to be more efficient operating between 30 and 40 efficiency compared to 20 for a pv
farm and is capable of producing tens to hundreds of megawatts of power crescent dune boasted an
installed capacity of 110 megawatts but what sets these systems apart from traditional pv farms
is that they also have mechanisms to store the energy they produce instead of converting solar
energy into electricity csps converts solar energy into thermal energy which they can then store in
a molten salt core inside that 640 foot high central tower once it's melted the salt moves
into a storage tank where it gets used to produce steam that steam moves turbines which then produce
electricity so that the folks in vegas can spend hours playing the slots just one more pull and i
know i'm going to win big right that means the sun goes down and that plant is still producing energy
long into the night once used it can be cycled back to the receiver to the reheater and it's such
a game changer in fact that you could arguably not even need peaker power plants because well
until maybe 2 am in the morning you wouldn't need to have any other form of energy the prospect of
crest and dune seems so exciting that the us department of energy gave it its full support
including some financial backing to the tune of over 500 million dollars initially the plant was
expected to produce over 40 000 megawatt hours every month and over 480 thousand megawatt hours
annually from the get-go construction delays offset deadlines by several months then by the
time it finally got up and running in september 2015 the plant only operated for eight months
before it had to shut down due to a leak in the molten salt storage system basically like a flood
of liquid hot magma powers baby yeah not good even once all that was sorted by 2018 the average
capacity was only around 20 compared to the original projection of 50 percent at its absolute
peak production in may 2019 the company only achieved about half of its original production
goals and only about for nine months regular outages and equipment failures eventually that the
plant soul buyer nevada energy to pull out of the arrangement telling regulators that the project
posed the most significant risk to its ability to meet the renewable energy portfolio goals that
that stings before the end 2019 the plan officially ceased operation so what exactly
went wrong with the crescent dunes power plant and is it a signal that all these people who hate
green energy initiatives were right that it can't actually work but before i answer that let me tell
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the companies that support this show while csp technology does boast some benefits like energy
storage after the sun goes down it's still really early in the life cycle of development
one major factor is cost when the technology began to debut in 2009 concentrated solar power
cost per megawatt was extremely competitive with photovoltaic aside from the failure of pumps and
maintenance and leaks in the molten salt reactor tank there was a bigger problem projects like
this take years to get off the ground so odds are people who are building this technology
were thinking about this and pitching investors as early as 2010 and i did the math the cost of
photovoltaic power was about two dollars per watt well then something really interesting happened
by 2020 that price has dropped from two dollars all the way down to about 30 cents per watt
that is what the company didn't see coming and this is a typical problem that many people face
when people think about adoption curves they do not understand just how quickly they ramp up one
question sure if it's already built why shut it down wouldn't it just keep on making energy
that's a great question the reason why it doesn't make sense anymore is because of the price you'd
have to sell the energy to run at cost so for example imagine you have maintenance teams that
are doing all the mirror cleaning up right you've got people greasing all the joints and stuff for
the motors you've got people dealing with the molten salt tank that all costs money so if
you want to be able to pay all those salaries for the 5 000 people 2 000 people whatever it
is who are working at that plant well you got to be able to pay them the only way to do that is to
then take whatever you produce and sell that for an equivalent amount of money to be profitable
right well that number was about four times higher than a traditional
solar panel farm and for that reason they spent a billion dollars in the desert with these mirrors
and they can't even operate it they can't turn it on because it would lose them money that is
the heartbreaking part about this i love that they tried it that investors gave it a shot
i love all that about it i just i feel like this is a good telltale sign for all the innovators out
there remember the s-curve of adoption you got to remember that like electric vehicle adoption
battery technology adoption isn't going to be some slow curve there is going to be a slow part and
then it is going to ramp up in an s-curve fashion this is the part of technology disruption that
almost everybody gets wrong people are saying evs might be half of all car sales by 2040. i
think that's way wrong the price of solar has dropped so much that if you go back in time and
think okay if you want to make a 40 megawatt hour plant that would have cost 80 billion dollars in
photovoltaic panels to build a farm of comparable size but today it's only 12 billion almost at 8x
reduction in price and that's what caused them so much trouble now it's much harder for newer less
established technologies like csp to compete but by the end of its run crescent dune was costing
nevada energy 135 dollars per megawatt hour compare that to roughly 30 dollars per megawatt
hour available from a pv farm located in the same area in nevada it just didn't make any financial
sense so fundamentally this came down to an issue of scale the thought was sure one photovoltaic
panel makes sense and if you get 10 of them on a roof for a customer that's cool but how are
we going to build a plant that can produce 40 000 megawatt hours using these panels the thought was
that it would just cost too much to scale up and that was kind of true back in 2010 but no
one again saw the price drop issue and this is one of those other challenges of engineering which is
understanding scale for example if i tried to make a pumped hydro storage system by taking a 5 or 25
gallon drum and putting it on my roof and pumping water up there when there's extra energy from the
sun and then letting it come back down and run a turbine when i needed it i would be way way way in
trouble because that just isn't a cost effective way in such a small scale pumped hydro can work
in the right location when you have a large tank a reservoir on top and bottom you can make that
very attractive in terms of cost per energy storage per kilowatt hour but that doesn't work
for a small system and this is kind of the problem they thought i know mirrors are cheap we can build
millions of mirrors have motors control it all all these parts are not really that exotic we
can build something at a much larger scale but by doing so you introduce a lot of complexion moving
parts you have motors that need lubrication and maintenance for adjusting the mirror locations
and again molten salt you can imagine what that must be like to handle right and this was the
problem don't worry there's still going to be tons of solar power plants but we're not going
to probably see as many of these molten type we will still see them they are still out there
but i think photovoltaic prices have come down so much that it just makes way more sense to build
future plants with them but there is still one issue right we mentioned the concentrated solar
thermal does have energy storage built right in molten salt is going to stay hot and as long as
it does it can continue to make power after the sun goes down this is just not going to be the
case with photovoltaic and that's where you got a couple these plants with battery storage we did a
video on the iron flow battery built by css we had a little lab tour we'll put a link in the video
description here they have a solution tesla has mega packs there is going to be tons of storage
coming online and i think what we need to do is use photovoltaic for the generation and we had
to couple that with an easier more efficient form of storage as opposed to combining the two so does
crescent dune spell the end of solar thermal energy well i think it will make it a harder
pillar swallow in the future but it's not over yet new designs include alternative welding practices
to improve methods of relocating heat and cold salt pumps to reduce the need for longer pumping
shafts and reduce downstream infrastructure cost which could help make csp technology more
accessible endeavors like china's subcon solar have exceeded six-month output targets at its
galinga tower in qinghai province brightsource's solar thermal system in california's mojave desert
currently sits at the largest solar thermal plant in the world and while crescent dune
ultimately failed datamined from its collapse is continuing to inform current and future projects
in hopes of making this technology more reliable and cost-effective but what do you think is csp
technology going to be the solar wave of the future should the us government place
itself in the position of playing benefactor on new green technology at the taxpayers expense
and what other green energy production and storage technologies are you excited about sound
off in the comments below but before you go real quick we have just enough time for the comment
of the week become my favorite part of the show by the way i don't that's a good thing or not so the
first comment comes from mitchell smith this is in regard to our mining helium 3 on the moon video
he says and others of you have noted i was pronouncing tritium wrong i said tritium and
it's tritium so thank you mitchell for being kind of at it and and pointing that out
i appreciate you to be fair tritium sounds way better try tm sounds like tri-tip like
i think you're hungry that might you might just be hungry and this is a new one uh that's
becoming more popular this is on our aptera video mata says waiting for thunderfoot so thunderfoot
is a youtube channel that debunks things and i did a video on the solid-state hydrogen video that we
made and so suddenly like there was an influx of people who came in and now they just say whenever
i make a new video waiting for thunderf00t to debunk it or something i don't know good for you
awesome thank you so much for watching guys check out other videos we'll see you soon