Next-Gen Solar Energy: Tapping Into the Sun’s Full Power | FD Engineering

[Music] here we are on the top of the tower 220 M and here you see all the solar field with the 10,600 mirrors which will be aiming the light of the Sun to the top of the receiver and that is increasing the temperature to 560 de [Music] c a global Industrial Revolution is underway yes we have a technological challenge for our environment for the well-being of the population of the planet for civilization driven by passionate dedicated individuals intent on shaping a new world I do it because I look at my kids and I I honestly

I'm convinced that this is the way A Cleaner World there is a way forward other than burning fossil fuels out of our funnels A Greener World this wind farm is producing more hours of power into the grid than all wind farms in the UK and probably in the world what we've done in the past is not going to solve these challenges we need to find new ways and I think the only way to do that is to bravely step forward and Implement technology together they are pushing engineering to its limits to create extraordinary machines that

can protect our planet for the [Music] future we face one of the greatest challenges in the history of humanity to eliminate the fuels that have driven progress and technology for over a century while our thirst for energy only grows could the solution lie with an ancient and distant power source it's without question that in our solar system the sun is the greatest source of energy and and the better we can take advantage of that the better it is for us as a civilization it's like a nuclear reactor in the sky and it provides endless power

and if we can Harvest just fractions of this it can power all our consumption giant strides have been made in capturing the sun's energy but to replace fossil fuels solar power needs to step up a gear we've got a long way to go the way I see it we've only got 2% of the world's energy is solar so there's a massive opportunity there and this technology is made for it Engineers are racing to capture more of the sun's power to open vast new expanses for solar panels and even to make solar electricity available through the

night this is the food cycle that allow us to keep generation 24 hours using 100% only renewable energy the light from the sun this is the future the vast majority of solar power today is generated by silicon solar panels these are made of many individual cells each cell has two Thin layers of crystalline silicon which have been altered so that one is slightly negatively charged while the other is positive the magic happens when light falls on it electrons in the Silicon atoms absorb the energy and Break Free the negatively charged electrons are then drawn towards

the positive layer once connected to a circuit this flow of electrons becomes electricity solar panels like this are on rooftops all over the world producing clean green electricity to power our homes and charge our gadgets but transportation is a much tougher challenge it's still overwhelmingly powered by fossil fuels a tech startup in Holland has gone right back to the drawing board inventing a new car from first principles that could revolutionize personal travel their goal is to prevent billions of people buying gas powered cars by offering them a vehicle that charges itself for free everybody said

we couldn't do it and that's what makes it interesting so I think that's one actually one of the things that motivates us that it uh seems like an impossible challenge and actually if we look back at at the beginning it all started with the world solar challenge their story began at a Race Across Australia every 2 years a fleet of futuristic Vehicles can be seen streaking across the [Music] desert this 1800m race is powered by the sun with cars built by students from around the [Music] world in 2012 a Dutch team team from einhoven including

electrical engineering student AO vanam decided to enter for the first time I think most people were there for the adventure and for actually building something with your own hands during your studies and seeing it work and then trying to win the race in Australia in previous years all entries had been one seaters built purely for Speed but that year the team decided to enter a new cat atory that awarded extra points for comfort and practicality the idea was to encourage the development of a commercially viable solar powered car we said okay let's build a fourer

car and that became Stella uh the world's first solar powered family car it was a um a car that had a flat roof especially because of the efficiency of the solar panels furthermore it was very aerodynamic it was very lightweight it was made almost completely out of carbon fiber the team had just over a year to fully design and build a radical new solar car that could also be a practical family vehicle for everyday use Stella they hoped would be the blueprint for the car of the future people would be sleeping actually at the University

waking up build a solar car go back to sleep for 6 hours wake up and go build again so this was uh really an intense period for most of the the people in the [Music] team on the 6th of October 2013 the only family-sized car in the race crossed the starting line in Darwin Australia for the next 6 days Stella would be racing through the desert powered by the sun orbe it accompanied by gas- powerered support Vehicles during the race we had the car and then in front of that we had a small van called

a strategy van and was packed with computers and we had two guys so me and and my buddy modeling and calculating exactly how fast should we drive with the solar car such that at the end of the day our battery is exactly empty everyone expected the comfortable four- seater to be much slower than the others but by day three she'd hit 75 mph so fast the team bus couldn't keep up before long she'd overtaken their leading competitor team bokam from Germany despite carrying twice as many people but the following day the car ran into difficulty

and needed an emergency pit stop the team fixed the issues but they'd lost precious minutes and on day five they lost even more time to their [Music] Rivals by the morning of the final day the race was still tight but IO had a trick up his sleeve Stella crossed the line in Adelaide having driven 1,00 mil in 40 hours with an average speed of 47 mph the second fastest in the category but the cars weren't only judged on speed they could earn extra points for the number of passengers carried and how it would fare in

the real world and it's here that Stella came into her own a jury would uh take your car and see if they can uh parallel park it easy uh how many suitcases would spit in are there any cup holders how easy is it to get in and get out Etc and uh they would score points on that for all the different cars and then all of these scores combined would make up the uh the final winner of the of the cruy club with bonus points for real world credentials the team squeezed the head of the

competition and took first place with a family-sized car but they knew that to really make a difference the hard part was still ahead of them at that point you're not really changing anything right you're just making one car and driving it through the desert of Australia and there's five trucks behind it to carry all the spare parts so you really have to take the concept to the market to really make an impact and try and improve the planet in that [Music] sense AO and four other team members decided to make the dream a reality and

launched Lightyear to make solar powered cars for the public in one year the entire fleet of cars throughout the world they will drive one lie worth of kilometers and the mission of the company is to get that to one lie of sustainable kilometers by 2035 to achieve their mission they set about turning Stella's outlandish design into something more attractive to Consumers while still keeping the radical approach we came up with our own scoring formula what would make this car better and the the key metric that we optimize the lia one for is the amount of

miles you can drive each a on the Sun so the amount of miles you can drive for free and that also guided all the decisions so if you have to decide whether the car should be a bit wider to accommodate more solar panels or whether it should be a bit smaller to make it more aerodynamic you calculate how much solar kilometers would option one give and how many solar cols would option two give and then make your decision so this what guided the the development of the LI as Chief technical officer IO has overseen the

design of the solar panels at their workshop in the Netherlands Lightyear are fixing them in place with panels on the roof and the Bonnet they cover 54 s ft in total but although they work in the same way as a standard panel IO has altered the structure to maximize the power a special technique can reveal the design we can actually show the structure of the panels and and defects that the panel will have using an El test and with an El test you actually use the solar panel in Reverse so normally the solar panel would

turn sunlight into electricity but if you actually do it the other way around and you provide the electricity to the panel it will work as a light source and it will light up in the infrared uh spectrum and now we make it dark in the room so we turn off the lights we take a picture with the camera that's modified to actually show up the IR light and then we can see the the group slide [Music] on you see all of the cells lighting up but there's a couple of exceptions so this is actually an

old panel that we used already for a lot of test and we abused quite a bit so that's also the places where the solar cells themselves don't work anymore like an x-ray as well as showing what's broken the image reveals the inner structure so to increase the power output of the solar panel we've uh done lots of small tricks like uh putting all the solar cells pretty close to the edge we've cut them to a smaller size and that way we can place them closer together Lightyear claim these are the most efficient solar panels on

any car with the improvements gaining them 20% more power and as well as squeezing more solar cells into every square foot IO has divided them into groups to see the benefit of that you need sunlight luckily for countries like Holland the panels even work on a cloudy day first IO is connecting this regular soda panel to a voltmeter this will reveal what impact Shadows can have on the power they produce so we've connected the panel to the meter and if I put a shadow on it you will see this number dropping and it actually doesn't

matter where where I put the shadow you lose the same amount of energy if a shadow falls on even one solar cell the power generated by every other cell drops by the same amount even if they're in sunlight because they're all connected so the whole panel becomes much less efficient this doesn't matter much for panels on rooftops that rarely have Shadows Fall on them but cars regularly drive under trees or past buildings on this panel we've actually divided the panel into 11 very small panels these 11 very small panels allow us that uh if one

of them is in the shade uh one cell it will only shut down uh one small group of the panel and not the entire panel and we can actually demonstrate this and if I go over it with this board then I create a shadow on the front and then only the first meter will show that it actually drops and the other meters they still show the same value and then if I move it along the the value on the first meter actually comes back and it drops on the second meter and then if I move

even further along the same thing happens on the third meter so as I go over the different groups I will only shut down the performance of that group and not of the entire roof which you would see on a regular panel as if Reinventing the solar panel wasn't enough the Lightyear team have an even bigger engineering goal making the car one of the most efficient ever produced the LI one is designed to maximize the amount of miles you can drive Drive each year on the sun and if you break that down then the biggest factor

is aerodynamics so making the car more aerodynamic is where you can save the most on the energy consumption of the car most of the design process happens using computer [Music] simulations but now the team must prove how streamlined the car really is aname course is responsible for Lightyear one aerodynamics we are currently uh in the Wind Tunnel with the Prototype of Li one to test how it performs at different speeds so we test the air flow over the car how much track does it produce and what effect that has on uh the range eventually of

the car the tests will reveal the drag coefficient a number that tells you how much wind resistance the car has the target is to get down to about 0.2 which would equal the most streamlined production car ever made with such low drag it could drive much further with the precious solar energy it collects but compared to a regular car the team face an extra challenge as well as being streamlined the shape must also fit enough panels the aerodynamics are a bit constrained by the solar roof um it needs to be quite flat surface on top

instead of having uh very curved Services which would be maybe better for aerodynamics but the team have managed to find a profile that boosts both the solar power and efficiency one that gives a larger area for the panels while also reducing drag you can see that we have a very shallow slope going to the rear and the flow can stay attached over that full length and if you have a shorter car we will have a steeper slope and that will uh detach the flow and will create a lot of uh track the team analyzed and

modified every inch of the car replacing bulky Wing mirrors with streamlined cameras and fixing covers over the back wheels eventually the team get the drag coefficient down even further than they had hoped below 0.2 so we can claim to be the the most efficient production car by the time you get to production but that's of course the first time this world beating efficiency means the solar energy can go much further even in cool cloudy countries the solar panel will actually give you enough energy to drive somewhere around 8,000 kilm per year in the Netherlands it

doesn't sound like that much right uh 8,000 km but the average car in the Netherlands actually drives only 11,000 for California they drive much more but there's also much more sunlight so you you get again around 70% of your annual energy need you get from the solar panel for the other 30% the Lightyear 1 can be plugged in and charged like a regular electric car for now to pre-order one will set you back well over $100,000 but it could also save thousands at the pump towards the future we will be developing um an affordable version

of the of the ler one and we see Energy Efficiency as the key to the price in the longer term but while solar cars may still have a premium price tag the cost of standard solar panels has already [Music] plummeted the main mineral used to make solar panels quartz is abundant and cheap and by mass Manufacturing in large factories with automated production lines they also cost less to make solar power now is the most affordable source of uh Power it's just a matter of capturing this uh energy and uh solar power now beats uh cold

Firepower diesel generators and uh now hundreds of millions of the solar panels are manufactured every year with such cheap panels available solar Farms have mushroomed many are so large they're visible from space some generate over 2 gaw of electricity enough to charge 400 million phones at the same time and yet solar power still produces only 2% of the world's electricity that's because although panels are cheap they need the right kind of location so one of the challenges and this is now starting to happen with the very high number of solar panels we are searching for

new places to put them and it's a quest to find these areas in good positions as solar Farms get bigger they start to compete with other uses for the land such as Recreation farming forests and other wildlife habitats it's a questionable whether to set aside big surfaces for the solar farms and it's becoming more and more difficult to find good spots for at least very large solar plants [Music] to solve this conundrum an entirely different approach is starting to make waves borer bionet is the founder of ocean Sun a company making platforms for soda panels

that float borer realized that there are water bodies all over the world with the readily available sunlet surfaces many like the maggot Reservoir in the Philippines are next to hydr power dams which has a big benefit one very nice thing about combining floating solar power and the hydroelectric power is the very short distance from producing solar power to delivering it out to the grid because the infrastructure is already in place at the power station the solar panels generate electricity when it's sunny while the dam makes power when it rains it has the flexibility over the

season for the rainy season and the dry seasons you can make a more steady power production so this combination is a fantastic application other companies are also targeting lakes and reservoirs but borer has set his sights on a much bigger body of water the sea the main obstacle is the ocean waves the challenge is very much to create a protective environment for the solar panels and also to cope with waves and also strong winds that can occur on water surfaces ocean Sun tested their design off Norway's Coast the most critical piece of engineering that protects

the panels is also the simplest the thin polyethylene membrane that forms the surface this is the fabric of our system which we place the solar panels on top as you can see it's less than 1 mm thick it interacts with the surface tension of the water to create two curious and Powerful effects firstly it boosts the strength of the material this fantastic effect that this layer has when we put it on top and it came to us as a big surprise that you could actually walk around on the water surface through this very thin Fabric

and secondly B discovered that the membrane changes how water behaves it has a dampening effect on the motion of the waves and it serves as an ideal surface for placing solar power on top of it in January 2019 the floating system had a chance to prove itself in the winter we have had a pretty bad uh storm coming in over Norway Bridges were closed and the feries stopped and uh we got really got to test our system in quite bad conditions the floating solar array was hit by high winds and waves once the storm had

blown over the panels emerged unscathed and still generating power having proved it can survive harsh ocean conditions seab based solar seems perfectly placed for an energy Revolution as nearly half the world's population lives near the coast many big cities like here in Oslo have the ocean right on their doorstep and if we can use the surfaces here for floating solar power you have a very short transmission to the consumers research is underway to minimize any negative impact on marine life so far results have shown that floating panels appear to reduce damaging algae blooms with water

surfaces now available as well as land experts estimate that 70,000 new solar panels are being laid every hour equivalent to a, th000 soccer fields a day but although solar is already the world's fastest growing energy technology it could be generating even more power standard solar cells can only convert about a fifth of the energy that's available in sunlight into electricity a fundamental problem with your standard solar panels it captures the little bit for electricity 15 to 20% and throws the rest away if that percentage were increased we could accelerate the transition to clean energy sources

[Music] in Victoria Australia a company called Ren think they have found a way to harness more of the sun's power inventor John lassik came up with part of the solution as a student way back in 1975 I was pretty ambitious for a young lad and I thought if you're going to make perhaps a quarter or even half of the world's energy from solar energy you have to have something that is highly efficient and very very powerful in the 1970s solar panels were small and even less efficient than they are today but Jon had a simple

idea how to supercharge them he calculated that a parabolic dish with a reflective surface could focus sunlight onto one small solar cell concentrating the power of the sun like a magnifying glass so he had a parabola-shaped Bowl made for him in pottery class and then ingeniously lined it with a reflective bag from a box of wine I put those two items together and produced a solar concentrator we produced several 100 times more power out of that cell and at that moment I knew we're on to something briefly it seemed John had found the perfect way

to capture the sun's energy but he'd overlooked one thing unfortunately about 10 seconds later the cell fell to Pieces because of the very high intensity in the heat it reached several hundred de to overcome this Jon developed a way to protect the cells from overheating a system he still uses today normally we'd expose these to 750 Suns of intensity and what we have to do is have a module that is that tough it can and a blowtorch it's the equivalent of 750 Suns of intensity the apparatus keeps the solar module cool even when blasted with

heat intense enough to melt steel the secret system involves pumping High Press water through the back of the panel Stone Co that shows how effective the cooling is and stone cold with a he heat problem solved Jon scaled up his idea into bigger and bigger dishes eventually he found a system that could focus even more sunlight at rayen's Pilot plant in Bendigo Victoria instead of focusing sunlight with a parabolic dish they used giant mirrors these reflect sunlight onto solar modules at the top of three tall towers what we do is we put put an array

of these modules into a large receiver that has a field of mirrors that focus a massive beam of light to that receiver where we can produce megawatts of electricity out of that array of modules the receivers are exposed to 750 times more sunlight than they would be on their own and this allows another major technological Advance their solar module consist not of normal solar cells which turn around 20% of sunlight into electricity but of a special type called multi- Junction cells which produce far more power this is The Flash test that we're about to demonstrate

and this measures the power and the performance of a module so we take a module and we place it into the chamber this machine simulates the sun we have a flash gun at the top which provides the highly intense light light we simply run the process and the Machine collects the Vital Information about the module so the main indicators uh being the power at 2.27 KW the efficiency of an astonishing 36.9% multi-junction cells can turn around 40% of the sun's energy to electricity nearly double what conventional ones achieve we this is because Sunshine consists of

many different wavelengths or colors of light standard solar cells have one pair of silicon layers which can only absorb a small range of those wavelengths the rest is wasted multi-junction cells on the other hand have several pairs of layers each made of different materials that can absorb different wavelengths so more of the sun's power is harvested although multi-junction cells are around twice as efficient their price is also higher so they're normally only used to power specialist equipment like space satellites but by concentrating the sunshine rayen only need a small number to capture a vast amount

of light the trick that we have is yes we pay 100 times more per square cm for the cell but we get 1,500 100 times more power out of the cell in our system when the sun is focused on them just two of these can produce as much electricity as 20 fullsize solar panels covering the roof of a large house Jon has plans to scale up his Pilot plant to produce gwatt of power and they can even share the landed on with others what we can do is spread the collect is out a little bit

which makes the system very efficient but it allows the grass to grow and we can actually run stock at the same time so you've got a solar farm and you've got an agricultural Farm running on the same land the beauty of a light footprint Ren hope to disrupt the industry with their radical approach harnessing even more of the plentiful power we receive from the Sun but despite its success solar energy currently has a major drawback demand for power surges in the evening just as the Sun is setting unlike fossil fuel power stations most solar Farms

can only produce electricity when the sun is shining in the Arid atakama desert in Chile a major new development is aimed at solving The Dilemma Sero dominador like the ren plant in Australia Sero dominador has a tower surrounded by mirrors that will track the Sun and collect its energy but the system works in a fundamentally different way and on a far bigger [Music] scale once complete the tower will rise as high as a 70 story Skys creper Francisco viso is Project Director of this groundbreaking Venture it is very important to develop project like this because

if we really want to turn page on the fil fuels we need to create green energy renewable energy that is able to work 24 hours in the night one of the most challenging things by constructing this kind of plants in the desert with this big tower is the quick the seismic movements we need to control it by doing an special design and a special engineering and a special construction for the 820 ft high tower to be Quake proof its foundations must be 24 ft [Music] deep once the main structure was complete an enormous receiver was

assembled for the top this is where the sunlight will be reflected [Music] onto but the 72-hour long procedure to lift it into place had never been attempted before lifting up this equipment was one of the biggest engineering and construction Maneuvers in South America all time it was one of the most tensed moments in our life in construction we have been lifting to re taking care of the her and the wind and it was a very very difficult maneuver by lifting 3,000 tons equipment from on the ground 250 m to the top of the tower was

challenging was difficult but was very nice the receiver which weighs as much as a Navy frig was lifted by 16 powerful hydraulic jacks for safety it had to be moved no faster than 16 ftph after 3 days the receiver reached the top and was successfully fixed in place once complete the tower became the second tallest man-made structure in Chile and the fifth highest on the [Music] continent as well as building the giant Tower the workers have a huge job assembling and calibrating over 10,000 giant mechanical mirrors called heliostats spread over an area of 1700 Acres

each one is the size of a helipad and can tilt in any direction today the team in the control room are calibrating the [Music] heliostats Jose Romero is the solar field commissioning manager he must ensure that every heliostat can eventually reflect the sun's radiation accurately onto the receiver at the top of the tower but as the sun moves through the sky the heliostats must also move to keep the reflected Sunbeam trained on exactly the right spot if they even a fraction of a degree out of position the whole system could fail for each heliostat to

be able to automatically track the Sun the team must first train the reflected beam of light onto a Target on the tower and it [Music] once the light spot has been locked into position the system will be able to find the black receiver automatically one down 10,599 to go the best view of the heliostat field is from the top of the central tower to get there take takes a 13-minute ride in an elevator here we are on the top of the tower 220 M and here you see all the solar field with the 10,600 mirrors

which will be reflecting the light of the Sun to the top of this Tower just where we are right now it's very very nice when in the morning they wake up and like some flowers they are following in the Sun and aiming the light of the Sun to the top of the [Music] receiver from here you can see the big difference between this site and conventional solar power plants there are no solar panels anywhere at sod dominador they will generate electricity a completely different way a special liquid made from Salt is pumped to the the

receiver at the top of the tower here the reflected heat from the sun raises the liquid's temperature to a whopping 10 140° f as hot as lava that molten salt is then pumped back down the tower where it's used to heat water and make high pressure steam that steam drives the turbine and makes electricity [Music] Sero dominador is not the first solar plant to generate electricity this way but it aims to be one of the first to produce power reliably on demand 24 hours a day conventional batteries are much too expensive to use on this

scale so to generate electricity through the night sod dominador has two giant storage tanks at the bottom of the Tower here we have the tanks the salt today is here melted 46,000 tons of salt inside those tanks waiting for being pumped to the top of the [Music] tower the salt from a nearby Mine in Northern Chile consists of sodium and potassium nitrates which have the ideal properties to store heat safely and reliably once on site the salt was melted then the liquid was stored in a tank despite being 600° F this is known as the

cold tank in the morning we have all the salt there in the coal tank 46,000 tons of salt there during the day the salt is being pumped to the top of the receiver to the top of the tower in the receiver we hit the salt and we start to fill the hot tank so during the day The cold tank is getting empty and the hot tank is getting full in the hot tank the salt is stored at 1, 140° F the tanks are so well insulated that the temperature only drops 1° per day during the

full night we are using that salt to generate a steam and at the end of the night again we have the coal tank completely full of salt and this is the full battery cycle that allow us to keep generation 24 hour using 100% only renewable energy the light from the sand solar tower technology with molten salt tanks can generate solar electricity on demand 24/7 but they only work efficiently in countries with intense sunlight near the equator if power from the Sun is to truly replace fossil fuels we need solar generated electricity available day and night

[Music] [Music] everywhere a team at the US Naval research laboratory is working on a way to supply solar power to any place anytime it's called space solar and it sounds like something from a science fiction movie the idea of space solar is that instead of collecting sunlight on the ground using a solar panel the way we usually do it is we take that solar panel instead and put it in space and then send it to where you need it on Earth we kind of take it for granted now that we can go anywhere on this

planet and take out your phone and it tells you where you are and we can do that because we have a system of satellites the global positioning satellites which was also created here at the naval research laboratory and we're talking about doing the same thing for energy imagine if you could just go anywhere on Earth you wouldn't have to worry about charging your batteries or where you're going to plug in and just have energy no matter where you are Dr Paul jaffy is the lead engineer on the project in 2019 his team set out to

demonstrate a vital part of the technology at one of the world's biggest Marine testing facilities a prototype system to transfer power over long distances without using wires instead the power will be sent as a laser beam so we have here today A 2 KW laser transmitter and we have a receiver that is made out of photovoltaics similar to what you would find in a solar panel and this is really a remarkable capability that unlocks all kinds of amazing possibilities so the power beam itself is invisible and completely silent the way that we can help show

where it is is with this $20,000 infrared imager you can see the transmitter sending the beam over 325 m to the receiver at this end of the Basin which converts that back to electricity for us to use you'll notice though that you cannot see the beam if you just look without an imager the aim is to ultimately use a scaled up version to send beams of solar energy collected in space back to Earth the transmitter would be on a satellite with the receiver down on the Earth's surface imagine if we could take the boundless sunlight

in space send it effectively to the ground wherever we need it whether it's a refugee camp whether it's a developing country places that are difficult and expensive to get energy to today if we could do that in an effective way it would be truly revolutionary [Music] but firing a giant laser beam at Earth from space might naturally cause alarm so Paul's team have developed a safety mechanism and are testing it out today the system should detect when something or someone enters the beam and instantly shut down this solar circuit breaker means the technology could be

used on a much bigger scale in the future for now though Paul's team are happy to use the beamed electricity to make a simple Cupa Joe this demonstration has exceeded our expectations many times over we are opening people's eyes to the prospect for this revolutionary technology as well as creating safe power beams Po's team have been working for 10 years on a prototype space solar module called called pram its job is to generate solar power and convert it to a form of energy that could be beamed to Earth to check that the module would work

outside the atmosphere the team simulated space inside the lab liquid nitrogen matched the extreme cold a vacuum chamber removed the air while Zenon lamps mimicked the intense sunlight but although space conditions are harsh there's more energy available to harness in space it's always daytime and it's always brighter than anywhere on Earth so you not only have 24-hour day sunlight but it is also brighter you never have to worry about clouds or nighttime or rain or anything that would interfere with the collection of solar energy The Next Step was space itself T minus 3 2 1

and lift [Music] off after more than a decade's work in May 2020 the module launched aboard the US Air Force X-37B orbital test [Music] vehicle it almost felt surreal to think of how it started as just like a kind of crazy idea that we proposed and got the funding and resources and support to build and finally made it to a point where we're actually launching it into space and it's operating an orbit and it's sending us data that we're now going to use to continue to push this technology forward Paul's team are laying the groundwork

for a potential energy revolution in years to come [Music] in the meantime other Solar Technologies are already powering ahead solar Towers capable of generating electricity 24 hours a day are appearing in Sunny countries around the world from Israel to South Africa while advances in technology capture more and more of the Sun energy in Australia regen plan to start harnessing the heat from their cooling system to produce another critical resource alongside electricity that byproduct heat can be used to desalinate water very cheaply and that produces the two most important resources that any Community needs power and

water with Power and Water you can do anything Lightyear have plans for a car that's so cheap to run that billions of drivers would choose solar powered transportation that became the mission of the company clean Mobility for everyone that's what we're working towards and first by making unfortunately a rather expensive car to test the technology to show everybody that this is working and then the next step is to make it available to everyone to fulfill the mission and the spread of solar panels from Land onto lakes and oceans is opening up an almost Limitless opportunity

to generate clean electricity from the Sun I'm very optimistic I think technology can provide the solutions that we can develop this and that we can make this transition it's doable and the technology is almost [Music] there when it comes to solar the future looks bright [Music]