New technology could offer cheaper solar power

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• published: 21 Jul 2015
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SHOTLIST Rotem, Negev Desert, South Israel, 12.06.08 1. Medium shot of sun reflectors zoom out to extreme wide shot of solar power plant 2. Various reflectors 3. Close-up of sun boiler on top of tower 4. Wide shot of tower 5. SOUNDBITE: (English) John Woolard CEO, Brightsource Energy: "We are announcing the opening of our pilot plant in Israel and it's 6 mega watts thermal and it's one of the first high temperature high pressure tower designs to go live at this scale worldwide". 6. Worker of plant in control room 7. Close-up worker typing on computer 8. Close-up of worker looking at plant 9. Workers in control room looking at plant 10. Workers in control room 11. SOUNDBITE: (English) John Woolard CEO, Brightsource Energy: "By operating at higher temperature and higher pressure than has been done before, you can drive costs down dramatically, so it's all about higher efficiency driving lower costs and that can help make solar thermal compete directly with fossil fuels." 12. Sign on tower reading: Solar Energy Development Center 13. Panning shot of tower 14. Tilt up shot of tower 15. Lift of tower coming down 16. Close-up of lift 17. Wide of power plant 18. SOUNDBITE: (English) John Woolard CEO, Brightsource Energy: "If you look in to the future, Bright Source already has to build out, or is ready to build out, about one gigawatt of power plants which is roughly the size of a coal or a nuclear facility, we are negotiating many more gigawatts or hundreds or thousands of mega watts of power plants now and we intend to move out from the U.S. in to other countries in the next several years". 19. Tilt down shot of tower 20. Panning shot of reflectors with desert mountains in background 21. Close-up of reflector 22. Change focus to Wide shot of reflectors 23. Zoom out from reflectors to wide shot of reflectors with desert mountains in background 24. Panning wide shot of solar power plant LEAD IN: A Joint US Israeli team are testing a new solar technology plant aimed at cutting the cost of energy produced by the sun. The solar array in Israel's Negev Desert uses computer guided heliostats to track the sun. It's hoped the new technology will be used to complete full-sized facilities in California's Mojave desert in 2011. STORYLINE: Israeli companyc. and its American parent, Brightsource Energy, Inc., plan to use this Israeli solar array to test new technology for the three new solar plants under construction in California. The new technology uses fields of computer-guided flat mirrors called heliostats to track the sun and focus its rays on a boiler at the top of a 200-foot (60 metre) tower. Water inside the boiler turns to steam, which powers a turbine and produces electricity. The steam is then captured and cooled naturally so the water - scarce in the desert, can be reused. The test plant does not have a turbine to create electricity, but engineers can measure the pressure and temperature of the steam to estimate how much energy the towers would produce. As fossil fuels become more expensive, solar power is sought-after as a clean, renewable source of electricity. But harnessing the sun's rays has proved expensive and often inefficient. BrightSource CEO John Woolard estimated that the new technology could cut the costs associated with solar energy by 30 to 50 percent. Although the tower technology is not a new idea, he says no one's ever put it together in the right way before and the flat mirrors and sun-tracking technology improve on previous designs. Creators have employed a range of simpler cost-cutting strategies, such as using many small mirrors that can be mass-produced, instead of special-ordering a few large ones. keyword energy You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/6aa813c9dd6ccc3fcf5de770c8ebbebd Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork