Bill Gross: Moore's Law: A New Weapon in the Solar Arsenal

I think the opportunity is so big that we have to invest heavily in all these areas. I know a lot of that investment is going on here. I'm going to talk to you about one particular new weapon that I think we have in the solar arsenal to try and get there. This new weapon in the solar arsenal I feel is Moore's Law. And let me talk to you about some other resources and their trend lines. If you look at coal, it's going up. Oil is going up, natural gas is going up, steel, gold, metals, everything, food, corn, rice, everything is going up. The one thing that's going down consistently over the years, the price of computing power is going down so much, while everything else in the world is going up because everything else is a scarce resource. And computing power. The way we've been able to use our brain power to fit more in less space means that cost is going down so dramatically. How can we use this? How can we use Moore's Law to try and drive down the price of solar energy? So I started thinking about that a lot. I started thinking about how can I take the one thing that's going down in price and, and apply that to solar. You can't apply Moore's Law to PV panels, to photovoltaic cells because PV panels don't have microprocessors on them or in them. They're not taking advantage of the density that Moore's Law brings. They're taking advantage of maybe a slight reduction in cost of silicon, but that's again, a natural resource that's not going down. PV cells are based on area of usage. You just need a lot of area. Well, that means you have to use all the heavy intensive energy process and chemical process to make the cells on a large area basis. Well, we need to come up with some way to apply Moore's Law that doesn't need the area. Some way we can use a small microprocessor to leverage against something that's big. So that's what I started working on. I took a look at a taxonomy of all the different types of solar things. And over here on the left you have photovoltaic techniques, silicon panels, thin film panels, concentrated PV panels. And over on the right, solar thermal. And you have dishes and troughs, parabolic troughs, and linear fresnel concentrators and power tower. And I looked at all these things and way over here, this is the highest efficiency, the solar power tower. The solar thermal power tower is the highest efficiency solar conversion in the high 30% you can get. So I Figured if there's any place to try and apply Moore's Law, it'd be way over here on the right. And that's what I wanted to try and do. How do you apply Moore's Law to this high efficiency solar conversion system? So this is what the company we created to do. That is called esolar. This is a picture of an esolar plant in Southern California. And I'll talk to you how we applied Moore's Law to this. So the typical solar power plant that does solar thermal concentration takes a large mirror, a big parabolic mirror that is about the size of a tennis court, and tries to track it in two axes to concentrate sunlight to a single tower. But that requires huge construction in the field. We thought, what if you take that mirror and break it up into lots of little tiny mirrors. Now all of those would have to be controlled separately because they all have to move differently over the day to redirect their light to a single point. They're not all moving together, they're moving differently. But that's exactly what a microprocessor would be good at. What if we put a microprocessor in every single mirror? So compared to doing this big assembly and cranes and assembly in the field, because this is larger than can be shipped, this is larger than the shipping container. Each of these things could be smaller than a shipping container. We could deliver it. And this is what we came up with, a system that comes out. These things get pulled out of a shipping container. They get unfolded like an accordion onto the field and get bolted down to a bunch of ballasts that are sitting on the ground and just uses a regular wrench to tighten it down. So just regular hand tools. So we get rid of all the heavy equipment. Then you walk down the aisles and put the mirrors on and they're all crooked and different angles and everything like that. But we're going to use software to try and straighten that all out. And this is what it looks like at the ground level. You can see these racks that have all the wiring in it in advance, double axis actuators and some plain old about 1 square meter flat mirrors. So we don't have to curve the mirrors anymore. We don't have to make a parabola in metal and in glass. We're now going to make a parabola in software. So we're going to concentrate the sunlight dynamically with software. And the way we do that is this. We again taking advantage of Moore's Law too. Today you can buy high resolution sensors. You can put on some Towers in the corner. And those sensors can look at all the mirrors and really detect every single mirror. With image recognition, pick out each mirror with a GPS time clock, figure out the time of day and where the sun is, and look at the reflected beam coming out of each mirror. And in real time, compute the angle of every mirror. And we can do it at way, way higher precision than you ever could by surveying where the mirror is the way it's been done in the past. Now it requires a $2 microprocessor in every mirror. But a $2 microprocessor is negligible and off the shelf product that even 10 years ago would have cost $5,000 per mirror and you couldn't have done it. But today it costs $2. So it's just unbelievable what has happened that Moore's law allows this to take place. We can point the mirrors much more precisely, which means higher temperatures and higher efficiency, less spillage of light at the receiver, and we can just get much, much more cost effectiveness because we can have lighter structures, less steel, and less labor, all made up for by microprocessors. So what it looks like, as an example, when you first put down this row of mirrors, maybe hard to see back there, but on the left, because the ground is a little bit unflat, because the metal has thermal expansion, is a little bit crooked, because the mirrors have end stops that aren't exactly aligned. The best you can do with lining this up, the mirrors are accurate plus or minus about 3 degrees. But then after you run the software and command the mirrors to go flat, you can see here, this row is accurate to a twentieth of a degree. About the most accurate anybody ever achieved with this method was a half a degree. And now we're at 20th of a degree. So we're 10 times more accurate to just with the $2 microprocessor and every single mirror. So it really, really has caused a big difference in cost, a big difference in performance. And this is what the whole plant looks like. So here's rows of mirrors. You can see the parabola is made, and all the mirrors are all slightly curved. All the light from the sun is reflected up to the tower. Up at the tower, it's immensely hot. And then we make steam and then run a steam turbine at high efficiency and take the electricity and go into the grid. So this was, this is a 5 megawatt plant, this one in Palmdale, California. And we now have an order for 1,000 megawatts in India and 2,000 megawatts in China. The one in India is already under construction. China will begin next year. And you can imagine how proud I am of this when I started with my little tiny stuff back in high school. To be able to walk in a field like this, it's an eerie feeling, actually, because it's very quiet. You don't really hear much because there's little tiny motor actuators moving, the mirrors, the steam. Of course, you don't hear any of that in the tower. There's an immense amount of thermal energy up on the top of the tower, and it's very, very bright. But it's a really, really amazing sight to see, to be able take Moore's Law, apply it to an old idea, but really drive down the cost and hopefully get us there. We're within striking distance of the price of fossil fuels right now, and with some additional storage techniques and additional production, we should be able to get to the price of fossil fuels in just three to five years. Now, this is just one way of doing it. There's many, many ways. We encourage all of them. But I was just really excited to share with you this one particular angle of how you could take entrepreneurship, Moore's Law, and technology, apply it to relatively static field in solar energy, and try and make a new way to try and arbitrage those technologies to try and make a breakthrough.