How we can make solar power at night

What do you think, can CSP really make a comeback?

Anyone else thought they could work by moonlight when they first clicked the video? 💀

Another benefit about CSP over PV is that thanks to the use of turbines (that have inertia) it can help stabilize the frequency of the power grid, unlike PV which uses inverters that are more prone to frequency changes due to having no inertia.

Guess we'll see what plays out, but pretty sure PV + storage will be more economical than getting the higher complexity molten salt of concentrated solar to work. There's so many options for stationary storage from PV that are so much less complex: Li ion, redox flow, pumped hydro, thermal salt/sand, flywheels, etc. All of these eliminate a lot of complexity/moving parts compared to a single unified molten salt concentrated solar system even if having modest efficiency losses.

So basically just molten salt batteries? Couldn't you just hook that onto a photovoltaic plant? I get it might be less efficient transferring electrical energy to heat rather than direct heat transfer but if we're just looking for energy storage, I don't get how this is that much better considering the added cost, space and engineering needed for concentrated heat.

Like it or not, China's been the biggest enabler of clean technologies. I think the Chinese can figure out a way to make CSP competitive worldwide.

Would love to see more geothermal plants - underneath our feet, we have essentially unlimited energy.

Yeah, I heard about it. I was hot on the idea twenty years ago. I just couldn’t get other people excited enough about it. Say is there away you can turn thermal energy directly into electricity? Infrared photovoltaic

what do i think? i think there are several grid scale battery options that take over from lithium for longer term, which are less complex & less prone, and cheaper. more pv + more battery types will win the competition again. stored heat at old fossil plants is neat & cheap way to add peak and night power. i think melting stuff will always be more fraught & expensive. might be good for big industrial heat needs?

Solar PV panels tend to be dark/black, great at absorbing heat... And can hit 60°C in intense areas. So wire a cooling loop behind the panels to collect this thermal energy, and use that as a secondary generation mechanism ala thermal battery.

Battery progress is currently very fast. It’ll probably be normal panels plus batteries for storage that give cities solar power at night

Yes. Great to hear about the new CSP developments. Interesting you did not mention the small scale use of CSP for heat and potentially electricity. There are several European companies that are offering this technology. See solar thermal Europe.

These remind me of Helios one from New Vegas

There's a startup working on having floating mirrors in the orbit which can reflect sunlight onto solar panels at night and I expected atleast something of that sort when I clicked on this vid

As always, amazing video, thank you!

YES! I have heard of CSP. I used to see it each time I drove from LA to Las Vegas. I was so happy to see sustainable energy being produced. I love that it can store energy for so long even without sun! That's a service gap that we need to fill. Thanks for this video. I just moved from CA to northern Portugal and I'm having a hard time finding anyone to install a wind turbine at my home. It's my first priority due to all the wind my property experiences. THEN I'll fill the gap with PV.

great tech, seen it on other channnels, but your vid is very good too, great info, thanx, keep it up!!!

The problem with CSP is that they sacrifice economics and complexity to the god of collection efficiency. If you can reduce the efficiency by 10-20% and half the cost, you have a more economic viable solution. Instead of an extremely complex system of mirrors focusing on one point, use much less complex system of many parabolic mirror troughs with the collector running along the trough at the parabolic focal point. Instead of running the troughs north and south requiring constant tracking at speed through out the day, align the troughs east and west, requiring only a micro adjustment up/down once a day. Instead of requiring powerful motors to adjust the entire trough and collector, only adjust the collector. Each of these steps reduces the cost of complexity at a small loss of collection efficiency. It would be better to spend a little more on a phase change material that is a little less efficient and stays liquid at room temperature, than build in the cost to recover from salt becoming solid in the collection tubes when the temperature cannot be maintained.

I first heard about CSP when I was learning what climate change was about 20 years ago in school and looking into the various technologies society was planning on using to fight it (nuclear, wind turbines, solar cells, etc). I really liked CSP. It struck me as being an elegant solution, especially in the world we had back then where solar cells were extremely expensive. The idea of just bouncing the sunlight into something that would heat water for a steam turbine seemed simple and easy to scale up. I'm disappointed to see that the world didn't end up doing much with this technology. But it does make sense given how cheap solar cells got. We need to be smart with our money. No need throwing money at expensive, unreliable forms of electricity production when we have affordable, proven ones.

I'm not a power engineer, but know a bit about electricity. They glossed over the part where you can use photovoltaic panels to melt salt or sodium or other. They say it's not efficient, but the panels do not all need to be in 1 location. Panels can be scattered over the grid and excess daytime power used at a generating facility (where the big wires already go) to melt the salt/sodium/other.