Hot enough to fry an egg?

Hot enough to boil a pot of soup?

Hot enough to melt steel?

If you said steel, you’re correct!

Students at MIT have created a solar dish that can concentrate the sun to the point it produces enough heat to melt steel.

The solar technology most of us are familiar with are are probably the solar panels we see on sides of buildings. That type of solar power technology is called photo-voltaics.

The students used a newer form of solar technology - a parabolic collector. It consists of mirrors focused on a single point which can be heated to a high temperature.

The solar dish the MIT team created is causing excitement not only because of the amount of heat it can generate but because the dish was relatively inexpensive to create, meaning it could pay for itself in energy savings in just a couple of years instead of the 8 to 10 years it takes to recoup the cost of current solar panels.

The MIT team put together the 12 foot dish, made of aluminum tubing and mirrors, over the course of several weeks. It concentrates the energy of sunlight by a factor of 1,000 which is hot enough to melt solid steel.

If that heat is directed at a target such as water piped through black tubing it can create steam in a flash, thereby creating a source of steam energy.

The students who created the dish are excited about its possibilities and plan to produce the dish through their newly formed company, RawSolar.

There are some pretty smart people at MIT, much smarter than I am, and people there think this solar technology created by the students has incredible potential. MIT lecturer David Pelly said, “I’ve looked for years at a variety of solar approaches, and this is the cheapest I’ve seen. And the key thing in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world. I’ve looked all over for solar technology that could scale without subsidies. Almost nothing I’ve looked at has that potential. This does.”

I’m sure there are some “kinks” to work out before the dish is a completely viable consumer product though. My biggest concern would be safety. If I had a solar dish on my property that could get hot enough to melt steel I would certainly want it placed where nobody could get close to it and hurt themselves. But it certainly seems like a step in the right direction - one that takes us away from oil dependence which is no longer an “interesting though” but an almost immediate need.