Video of the Day: Using solar to sell cars

It’s a sure sign that solar power is skirting the edges of mainstream consciousness when it starts to feature in high-end advertisements that are not, per se, actually about solar.

Such is the case in the latest ad by French car maker, Peugeot, which features its sleek new 308 hybrid – the latest model of what was the world’s first diesel-electric passenger car – curving its way, not along some iconic coastal road but between the heliostats of the ground-breaking Gemasolar concentrating solar thermal plant near Seville, in Spain.

At its launch in October 2011, the Torresol Energy-owned facility was the first commercial-scale solar tower power plant to use molten salt, which captures heat during the day so that the plant can still produce energy at night.

Two years later, it managed to produce around the clock power for a record breaking 36 consecutive days.

Since then, the technology developed for Gemasolar by SENER has been applied in other facilities, such as the Noor 3 power plant in Morocco, a natural evolution of Gemasolar but seven times bigger, with a capacity of 150MWe.

According to Torresol, developments like these “will reinforce the proven technology of central tower receiver and heat storage, a system with undeniable potential in the global energy panorama.”

To Peugeot – and other major automakers, including Mercedes Benz and Ford – Gemasolar’s striking heliostats just made perfect sense as a backdrop for its new car.

(Apparently, the plant has also been used as a location by fashion brand Louis Vuitton and to for Sony’s PlayStation).

You can check out the new Peugeot ad below: