A clean energy startup, backed by Bill Gates , says it has achieved for the first time commercially very high temperatures from solar energy that could replace the need for fossil fuels in many heavily energy-intensive industries such as steel, cement, and petrochemicals production. The new company, Heliogen, announced its launch on Tuesday alongside the solar breakthrough that it had concentrated solar energy to exceed temperatures greater than 1,000 degrees Celsius. Heliogen and its strategic partner Parsons Corporation have been able to achieve the breakthrough temperatures with the help of computer vision software, a branch of AI, to hyper-accurately align a large array of mirrors to reflect sunlight to a single target. Previous commercial concentrating solar thermal systems have reached up to only half of the 1,000 degrees Celsius that Heliogen has achieved, the new company—whose team includes scientists and engineers from Caltech and MIT—said in a statement. Temperatures […]