INTRODUCTORY SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY ... - PHOTON Info

Under the Sun
to figure out how to make low-cost solar
cells and panels. For help, he hired six
of his daughter’s high school classmates,
who, once the processing line was up and
running, would take 1,000 3-inch diam-
eter wafers and assemble them into 33
panels every week, selling them for about
$300 apiece. »By Friday, we had the UPS
truck come and take the boxes away, that
was our production method.«
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In the mid- to late 1970s, in particu-
lar, Yerkes found willing customers in
companies like Exxon, ARCO, Amoco,
and Shell because PV supplied an an-
swer to very specific problems they
faced. In particular, offshore oil rigs,
which were sprouting all around the
Gulf of Mexico because of new discov-
eries, needed blinking lights and fog-
horns to avoid boat collisions. PV got
an additional boost in 1978 when the
Environmental Protection Agency out-
lawed the standard practice of dump-
ing batteries into the ocean when they
ceased functioning.
Oil and gas producers also found a
use for PV in keeping their well casings
and pipelines free of corrosion, which
was accomplished by generating a cur-
rent that broke down any corrosion that
might stop up their flow. Again, because
oil and gas fields tended to be in remote
spots, far from cheap grid power, PV be-
came a relatively inexpensive solution.
»Mostly it was businesses that had to get
something done and were doing it with
primary batteries,« says Yerkes. »It was
not romantic. Screw the cause. It was a
cheaper way to do something.«
Eventually, oil companies became
more than just customers of PV com-
panies – they became their owners. In
1983, Solarex was bought by Amoco; Ye-
rkes sold his company to ARCO in 1977,
becoming ARCO Solar; Exxon and Mo-
bil, too, had their own solar arms, and
they collectively invested millions in ef-
forts to lower the price of PV and make it
a more mainstream power source.
Why? For one thing, they could afford
to lose money. The price of oil had hit
unprecedented highs following the 1973
OPEC oil embargo and the companies
had plenty of cash to invest in promis-
ing technologies. »Companies had dif-
ferent thinking about it, but generally it
was, well, if this stuff really works, we
want to be a part of it,« says Bill Rever,
an almost three-decade veteran of the PV
industry, who got his start at Solarex and
now works for BP Solar. »It was a hedge,
a pretty insignificant hedge by oil com-
pany standards.«
But what was petty cash by the
standards of the oil companies was big
money for PV. It ultimately resulted in
some of the first large-scale solar pow-
er developments in the United States,
such as ARCO Solar’s 5 megawatt plant
on California’s Carrizo Plain. It also led
to suspicions that oil companies were
trying to snuff out the PV industry in
its infancy and, like the space program,
actually kept it alive. »I must say the oil
companies were very much interested
and Amoco was a marvelous investor,«
says Varadi. »They say oil companies
tried to kill solar. No, I can testify it was
a pleasure to deal with them.«
Lesson five: What the government
makes, it can also destroy
Oil can also be credited with the first
real government push – a precursor to
the Obama administration’s efforts to-
day – to make PV an important part of
the country’s energy mix. Just as the
Cold War presented an opportunity for
PV, the OPEC oil embargo, and subse-
quent gas lines and shortages, was yet
another geopolitical event that briefly
benefited the industry because it had
America scrambling for ways to wean
itself off foreign oil. »It was driven by
energy security,« says Neville Williams,
author of »Chasing the Sun,« who served
as an official promoting solar energy
during the Carter administration. »A
bunch of us on the inside of DOE and
energy policy felt it was a bad thing to
be so reliant on foreign oil.«
Determined to break that depen-
dence, Carter, who famously urged
Americans to turn their thermostats
down in winter and wear warmer
clothes to save energy, gave a speech to
Congress about solar and set a goal of
generating 20 percent of the country’s
energy from the sun and hydropower
by the year 2000. Paul Maycock was
brought in to run the PV program at
DOE and succeeded in growing the bud-
get to around $150 million per year.
Maycock had an ambitious agenda,
one that included focusing on research
and development as a way to bring
down costs and, during his tenure,
funded 50 megawatts in solar demon-
stration projects. These government-
funded installations were large for the
time and included the world’s first 100
kilowatt array in Natural Bridges, Utah.
This flurry of activity prompted a good
deal of optimism that PV was on the
cusp of an explosion. »The industry has
gone through phases of optimism,« says
Timothy Ball, who was one of install-
ers of the Utah array and is now presi-
dent of Mainstream Energy in San Luis
Obispo, California, a firm that invests
in and advises PV companies mostly on
the downstream end of the business.
»Around the end of the 1970s, the in-
dustry was in one of those phases of op-
timism and there was a lot of discussion
around how the cost of PV could drop to
where markets could expand.«
But it’s worth remembering that, at
least in a democracy, policies come and go
with elections. And when Ronald Reagan
defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980 to become
president, the days of major government
support were shelved. »His people said,
who needs solar? Put it on the shelf like a
good wine and wait until we need it,« says
Maycock, who recalls the pain he felt at
having to slash funding for work going on
at the Jet Propulsion Lab to try and get the
cost of PV down to $2 per watt by 1986.
»I resigned in March of 1981 when the
budget numbers came through.«
As funding for government projects
and research dried up, so too did interest
from large companies, like Bechtel, who
had entered PV and successfully landed
contracts for the largest DOE develop-
ments. By the mid-1980s, they were all
gone, says Ball. »It was no longer the
equivalent of building the Space Shuttle
November 2009