INTRODUCTORY SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY ... - PHOTON Info

Under the Sun
made to uniquely fit each new satellite,
a process that required training new
workers with every order. »We suggested
that they standardize solar cells and we
would make them continuously and
have them in inventory,« he says. »But
they wouldn’t buy that.«
Lesson three: No gets you nowhere
22
If one still relevant guiding principle
from the early days of PV is to be skepti-
cal of too much hype, another is that
when most people see dim prospects of
success there are always a few who see
opportunity. Such was the case with
two scientists, Peter Varadi and Joseph
Lindmayer, who were working in the
early 1970s at COMSAT, the Communi-
cation Satellite Corp.’s research lab.
COMSAT was one of the few busi-
nesses involved in developing PV for
space and both Lindmayer and Varadi
earned a good living improving solar
cells and managing the company’s phys-
ics and chemistry labs, respectively.
Things were running smoothly enough
at COMSAT, so Varadi and Lindmayer,
maybe a little bored, figured it was time
to do something new. As 1972 came to
a close, Varadi, a Hungarian native who
escaped the country before the Soviets
invaded in 1956, suggested to COMSAT
managers, a bunch of retired Air Force
generals, that the lab should investigate
ways to utilize PV on earth.
Nothing doing, the generals told Vara-
di and Lindmayer. Rather than settle back
into their cushy jobs, the duo, fortified by
Lindmayer still moved ahead with their
plans. Or at least they tried. Convinced
that their idea to bring down the cost
of PV and make it suitable for so-called
terrestrial applications was patently bril-
liant, Varadi says he figured all they had
to do was send their business plan to
venture capitalists and the money would
start flooding in. Twenty presentations
later, Solarex remained penniless. »If we
were very successful, they learned how
to spell photovoltaic,« says Varadi, who
attributes their failure to raise much
money to their complete lack of business
experience and the fact that the venture
capitalists had never even heard of PV.
Still undeterred, Varadi and Lind-
mayer managed to scrounge enough
money from friends and relatives, un-
derstanding that it meant they would
have to make Solarex a viable business
quickly. And they did, turning a profit
in just eight months, while also validat-
ing their hunch that, yes, PV did, in fact,
have a place on earth.
And just who on earth was buying the
PV that Solarex was making? There were
small markets, Varadi says, which were at-
tracted to solar for its economics, strange
as that may sound to an industry whose
perpetual bugaboo has been cost. For So-
larex, those earliest commercial markets
were not of the grid-tied commercial,
residential and utility type so focused
on these days: customers were businesses
and institutions that saw in PV a cheaper,
more reliable alternative to batteries.
Meeting the telecommunication
»A g u y fr o m l.A. c A m e up in A po r s c h e wi t h pV in th e bA c k«: th At’s ho w Jo h n schAeffer, seen he r e, t h e fo u n d e r of re A l go o d s, A
n o r t h e r n cAliforniA instAller, f i r s t be g A n selling mo d u l e s to of f-gr i d us e r s bA c k in th e 1970s. to d A y, 95 percent of hi s business is
a few glasses of champagne, decided on
New Year’s Eve in 1973 to take a stab at
bringing PV down to earth. »We decided
that to hell with the generals, we were go-
ing to do it ourselves,« Varadi said. Still at
the party, they settled on a name for their
still fictitious company: Solarex.
Even after the euphoria of the New
Year’s celebration wore off, Varadi and
s o l A r, m o s t of it gr i d-tied
needs of government institutions like
the United States Forest Service and the
Bureau of Land Management and police
departments brought in a lot of initial
business, Varadi says. »They were the
first serious customers we went after,« he
says. »For police in Arizona, they could
get no communications from repeater
stations in the mountains so they put in
solar.« Lights on navigational buoys also
needed power and it was a lot cheaper
to use PV – even at $20 per watt -than it
was to outfit a boat to go swap out a non-
rechargable battery every time it died,
which could add up to a bill of around
$6,000. Varadi, who outfitted buoys in
the Suez Canal with PV systems in the
mid-1970s, also found willing custom-
November 2009