INTRODUCTORY SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY ... - PHOTON Info

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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.« 24 In the mid- to late 1970s, in particular, 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 became 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 companies – 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 efforts 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 company 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 power 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 budget 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 president 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 industry was in one of those phases of optimism 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 developments. By the mid-1980s, they were all gone, says Ball. »It was no longer the equivalent of building the Space Shuttle November 2009
A m o d e s t b e g i n n i n g: in t e n s e m e d iA c o V e r A g e s w i r l e d A r o u n d the i nV e n t i o n o f the first silicon s o l A r c e l l At bell lAbs, i n c lu d i n g A f r o n t pA g e s t o r y in »the new yo r k ti m e s«. Am o n g the w A y s bell d e m o n s t r At e d it w A s by p o w e r i n g this 21-i n c h tAll ferris wheel or something like that,« he says. »It was more like standard business and their cost structure was better suited for much larger projects, which didn’t exist.« Lesson six: Customers come from the strangest places The area a few hours north of San Francisco, in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, has long been a place where people flock to get away: sometimes for a weekend respite from the crowded city, sometimes for a lifetime away from modern society. In the early 1970s, after graduating from the University of Cali- fornia at Berkeley, John Schaeffer made what was then a familiar pilgrimage for a small number of young people disaf- fected by tumultuous events like the Vietnam War and 20th century life in general, taking up residence on what he terms an »archetypal hippy commune« on 290 acres in Mendocino. There, he and his fellow New Age pioneers lived off the grid, with no electricity, no phone and no running water. That is, until Schaeffer, in 1976, discovered some 12-volt batteries in a hardware store and hooked them up to a car battery. »All of a sudden, in the November 2009 25 » middle of the woods, in a commune of Luddites who hated technology, there was light,« he says. »It was very contro- versial, nobody wanted electricity.« Well, not quite everyone eschewed electricity. Schaeffer soon discovered that there were quite a few folks who were tired of using candles and kerosene for light, enough for him to launch a company, Real Goods, in 1978, to pro- vide fellow off-grid rural dwellers prod- ucts that could bring power and conve- nience to their Spartan existence. A chance visitor to his store – which, to this day, sells composters, solar hot water National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
Page 1: A LONG, STRANGE TRIP SOUTHERN EXPOS
Page 4 and 5: 4 Under the Sun National Renewable
Page 6 and 7: 6 Photo of the month The garden of
Page 8 and 9: May we introduce ourselves? The PHO
Page 10 and 11: 10 Readers‘ letters PHOTON, welco
Page 12 and 13: 12 Readers‘ letters So why are so
Page 14 and 15: 14 Under the Sun History A long, No
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Page 28 and 29: 28 The 13 Solar Colonies PHOTON inv
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80 Architecture November 2009
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82 Architecture November 2009
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84 In Practice Proposals The perfec
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86 In Practice Is your proposal com
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88 In Practice that are predictable
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90 In Practice System: accomplished
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In Practice bluntly: »We have this
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Elkus’ golden trout pond is the l
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Test Laboratory A couple of years a
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Events From system inspection to in
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November 19-20, 2009 Alternative En
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Who should exhibit? • Manufacture
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Education & Training Producer-indep
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Internships New internships in the
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Ask the Editors Whether it’s abou
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Industry Registry Here is informati
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Preview The issue 12-2009 appears a
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