A startup backed by Bill Gates unveiled a breakthrough solar technology Tuesday that could free heavy industry from fossil fuels.

Heliogen, as the company is called, made itself known to the public with the announcement that it had developed a way to use artificial intelligence and mirrors to reflect enough sunlight to reach temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Celsius, CNN Business reported. That's the temperature needed to make cement, glass and steel. "We are rolling out technology that can beat the price of fossil fuels and also not make the CO2 emissions," Heliogen founder and CEO Bill Gross told CNN Business. "And that's really the holy grail." The sort of heavy industry processes that Heliogen's invention could heat account for around 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, David Roberts explained in Vox. And, until now, there have not been many promising low-carbon solutions.

"Bill and the team have truly now harnessed the sun," backer, company board member and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong told CNN Business. "The potential to humankind is enormous. ... The potential to business is unfathomable."

The new technology is a form of concentrating solar power (CSP), Roberts explained, when hundreds of mirrors are aligned in a field to direct sunlight at a steam turbine in a tower. The heat turns liquid to steam and powers the turbine, but the technology lost out to photovoltaic panels in the race for low-cost solar energy. But Heliogen's innovation could bring it back by relying on software to align the mirrors. "What Gross and his team of scientists and engineers at Heliogen have developed, in a nutshell, is a way to use even more computing power to keep the mirrors even more precisely aligned, thus generating even more heat," Roberts wrote.