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Kind: captions
Language: en

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These are the solar power towers of southern
Spain.

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This is one of the sunniest parts of Europe,

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and these were two of the first solar towers
ever built.

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Almost 2,000 heliostats, movable mirrors,

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constantly reflect the sun onto the towers,
heating up water into steam,

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and powering a turbine to generate electricity.

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And if you look online,

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you'll see quite a few documentaries who've
gotten a tour around there,

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who've been incredibly impressed by the technology,

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and who've been selling them as the future
of power generation.

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And these are impressive.

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Not just visually,

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the technology behind them is both very clever
and very simple:

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it's like bothering your teacher with the
sunlight reflection off your phone,

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just on a much, much bigger scale.

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But there is a catch.

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When these were built, Spain was in boom times,

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and heavily subsidising solar power.

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Investors loved it and piled in with their
own money,

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companies and researchers were happy to set
up all sorts of things like this,

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and suddenly the Spanish government had many
times the amount of solar power they'd planned for...

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and they had to subsidise all of it.

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And then the financial crash hit.

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The Spanish government cut subsidies.

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Not just for the future,

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not just for the plants that were under construction,

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but even for the plants that were already
built

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and relying on those subsidies to balance the books.

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The industry got cold feet: Spain had altered
the deal,

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and all the solar companies could do was pray
they didn't alter it any further.

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Or go bankrupt, one of the two.

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This might still have been viable, maybe,

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with some more research and development,

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and that's what they were trying to do.

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But now, the cost of regular,

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everyday solar panels is tumbling.

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Not mirrors, not like this,

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just normal solar panels, the sort that you can fit to your house

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or that get put out in massive fields as solar farms,

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converting sunlight directly to electricity.

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Whether the price of those panels is going
to keep falling

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depends on which team of researchers you believe,

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but it's already cheaper than building a giant
tower,

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putting in either high pressure water or molten
salt for it to heat,

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and dealing with thousands of moving parts
that all have to line up and track the sun

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perfectly

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and which might, occasionally, cook a few
birds in mid-flight.

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Don't get me wrong, this is a great bit of
technology on paper.

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It combines renewable energy with storage:

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if you're heating up something like molten
salt,

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you can save that power for hours to get you
through the night.

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And there are other plants like it being built:

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there's one nearly completed in the Atacama
Desert in South America.

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But right now,

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this is expensive.

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It might not have been,

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if history had taken a different track,

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if research had poured into these instead
of regular solar panels: but as it is,

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the future probably isn't quite this bright.