Futuring and Innovation - Solar Breakthrough

 

Sociotechnical Plan for Solar Breakthrough

The Solar Breakthrough is one of the most extraordinary human projects to save the planet by reducing the greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuels from the industry and replacing them with clean sunshine energy.

All we need these days is to reduce the amount of CO2 emissions generated by industrial states worldwide to help our earth and climate. So the company "Heliogen," backed with an undisclosed sum of money by Gill Gates and others, tries to use the sunshine and generate a clean high, temperature energy to replace the fossil fuels. "We are rolling out technology that can beat the price of fossil fuels and not make the CO2 emissions," Bill Gross, Heliogen's founder and CEO told CNN Business. 

This technology will absorb the sunshine using a solar farm to exceed temperatures higher than 1,500 degrees of Celcius. At that temperature, industries can replace the use of fossil fuels with this clean energy. This figure shows the sociotechnical plan of the project.

Features of Solar Breakthrough

The main feature of this project is using AI and DL to control every single solar panel to get the best focal point of the sunshine and gather all solar energy in some containers as a whole high-temperature clean energy. Currently, the project could collect 1,000 degrees of temperature, and they are working to increase that to 1,500 degrees of temperature.

Limitations of Solar Breakthrough

There are limitations in working and collecting the sunshine, as it is not available all the time and in each place on the earth equally. Therefore, this project most likely is the best solution for those industries in areas with higher access to sunshine.

Purpose of Solar Breakthrough

The main purpose of the Solar project Breakthrough, as mentioned above, is to create a clean high, temperature energy using sunshine to replace the traditional fossil fuels and greenhouse energy. The following image shows a solar farm in the Los Angeles backed by Bill Gates.

References

Greencarcongress. (2019). Heliogen launches, achieves > 1,000 ˚C from concentrated sunlight for industrial processes. Green Car Congress. Retrieved 2022, from https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/11/20191125-heliogen.html

Matt Egan, CNN Business. (2019, November 19). Secretive energy startup backed by Bill Gates achieves solar breakthrough. CNN. Retrieved 2022, from https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/19/business/heliogen-solar-energy-bill-gates/index.html