Photographer Captures Dazzling Aerial Photos of Solar Power Plants

Photographer Tom Hegen has captured a stunning series of aerial shots displaying what sprawling photo voltaic ability vegetation glance like from a bird’s-eye look at. The undertaking is titled The Photo voltaic Power Sequence.

Hegen is a German photographer who has centered his vocation on capturing aerial pictures that offer insights into the traces individuals are leaving on Earth’s floor.

Hegen “provides an overview of places where by we extract, refine and consume sources,” his website reads. “Ultimately, he provides insights into the sophisticated marriage between human and their surroundings. Generally deciding upon to doc abstract perspectives, he reads landscapes primarily based on their significance inside of the worldwide human impression on world earth.”

Capturing Photo voltaic Crops from the Sky

In 2021, Hegen traveled by way of the United States, France, and Spain to photograph huge photo voltaic energy infrastructures that will be providing clear electricity for generations to appear. The pictures were shot from a helicopter.

“In a one hour, the quantity of electric power from the solar that strikes the Earth is far more than the complete world consumes in a year,” Hegen writes in his artist statement for the sequence. “Having this in brain, renewable electricity sources could be the important to combating local weather improve.

“What does transforming toward additional sustainable resources of energy glance like? This series explores photo voltaic ability vegetation in the United States, France, and Spain. These person-built, built landscapes stand for our attempts of setting up a much more sustainable upcoming in the most advanced techniques.”

The locations seen in Hegen’s undertaking include the Ivanpah Solar Electricity Facility in California’s Mojave Desert, the Crescent Dunes Solar Electrical power Venture in Nevada, the Les Mées Photo voltaic Farm in France, the PS10 Photo voltaic Electricity Plant close to Seville in Spain, and the Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant that’s also near Seville, Spain.

Two Sorts of Solar Ability Plants

The neatly-arranged round facilities seen in Hegen’s visuals are solar thermal electric power plants, which target sunlight from hundreds of going mirrors named heliostats onto a central collector tower. Although previously designs of these crops used the heat from the concentrated light-weight to heat drinking water and create steam, more recent plants use molten salts to keep vitality, boil water, and travel turbines to make energy — the capacity of the salts to store heat makes it possible for power to be produced even following the sun goes down.

Non-circular photo voltaic crops are photovoltaic energy stations (or photo voltaic farms), which use the exact engineering observed on residential roofs. Photovoltaic modules are applied to transform mild specifically into electrical energy.

A Watch of Unintended Artistic Elegance

“Aerial photography, to me, is like knowledge visualization for scientists,” Hegen claims in a 2022 interview with Fortune. “The elevated viewpoint has such a outstanding capability to present the scale and context of a landscape. I also take pleasure in the abstraction and aestheticization that arrives with shifting the viewpoint.

“There is no time for me to expertise the landscape and see all its particulars [when up in the air]. When I come again from production and glimpse at the pictures on a large observe, I have a second face with the landscape and can examine all the facts in the surroundings.”

The photographer tells Fortune that he generally sees unintentional artistic natural beauty in the way human beings interact with the planet in big-scale methods.

“[Aerial photography] shows proportions and reveals insights we wouldn’t be equipped to see from the floor,” the photographer states. “None of the sites I photograph have been intentionally built to be seen from the air and make visual sense. This demonstrates that we are all artists, generating on the canvas of the earth’s surface area.

“In this context, I see myself as a curator searching at sites that we have significantly altered.”

You can obtain far more of Hegen’s operate on his internet site and Instagram.

Image credits: All photographs by Tom Hegen.