I am a born again Solar Power Freak #1

I seem to be becoming a solar power freak. This is weird. This is very weird. This is downright alarming.

Here's the thing: many decades ago, in my long lost youth, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and people actually listened to disco (No. Really. They did), I paid a lot of attention to solar power. This was the 1970s and we were just getting our first taste of energy famine. OPEC had just screwed the tap down tight and it seemed pretty clear that it was a sign of things to come. (And it was.)

So I spent some time casting about for alternatives. What, I wondered, could take the place of oil. One of the things I looked at was solar power.

There are several ways of extracting electricity for sunlight. You can, for instance, focus the sun's rays on a boiler. Water turns to steam and turns a turbine. In the 1970s, I could even see such a system in operation. I was living in New Mexico in those days (as I am now) and Sandia Federal Labs had an enormous solar power program underway.

It was quite amazing, really. On some land south of the city, the scientists had constructed an enormous field of mirrors which focused the sun's light on a tower in their midst. You could see it from almost any place in town. And when it was in operation…Lord! The tower glowed like steel in a blast furnace.

As I say, impressive. The problem? It actually produced very little energy. Not really. Oh, it could turn water to steam and turn a turbine and all that, but it also consumed power, usually in passive ways. My father was working at Sandia at the time, and he put it simply and distressingly. "As near as I can tell," he told me, "it can produce almost enough energy to keep its own mirrors clean."

That was the kicker, you see. You don't just stick a mirror or lens out in a field and hope for the best. It gets dusty, particularly in a desert, and you have to polish it. Or it degrades in the environment. Ordinary mirrors lose their reflectiveness after a while, which is why antique mirrors often seem so dim and brown. So, you need to develop entirely new kinds of mirrors, things what will stay bright even after decades in the open. And, at the time, there were no such mirrors out there, or at least none that could be produced cheaply enough to make solar competitive with oil or coal.

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Okay, that seemed to pretty well take solar boilers out of the game…at least in most parts of the world. So, I turned to photovoltaics…that is, solar cells, materials that turn sunlight directly into energy. It's what people usually think when they say "solar power."

Solar cells are quick and convenient. You could use them pretty much anywhere. You can plaster your roof with 'em.

So, why not go with them?

Because…in the 1970s, they cost a lot, and they weren't too efficient, and they tended to degrade (like mirrors) over time. I remember looking at the numbers. In those days, solar cells were proven money losers. They consumed more energy to produce and maintain than they could possibly generate.

And that, as far as I was concerned, put paid to that.

I decided (around about 1980), that solar simply wasn't in the cards. What we needed to do, I thought, was focus on developing some other means of power production…Fusion, in particular. And, until we got that problem licked, we'd need to rely on a combination of oil, coal, and gas.

Which was about where my thinking stopped.


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Okay, now fast-forward about thirty years. Give or take a little.

I began, dimly, in my limited way, to notice some things.

Like, for instance: the cost of solar cells has dropped like a gawdamn rock. I meant it has freaking plummeted. New manufacturing technologies, plus the advantages of sheer scale as more and more companies have come into the solar cell business, has brought them way, way down in price. (As I write this in early 2014, I can get enough solar panels to almost power my whole house for under $2K, depending on the supplier.)

And they've gotten more efficient. New solar cells are getting damn competitive with oil, gas, and coal in terms of generating energy…and they're getting better every day.

But the real news isn't in the cells themselves. It is in lots of other stuff. Like that batteries are getting better now. And a lot of our electronics don't consume that much energy any more. Your cell phone does things that would put a mainframe computer of the year 1980 to shame…but consumes so little power that it can be charged in under hour from any outlet.

And then there's weight. Things don't weigh what they used to. Which means it doesn't require as much energy to move them.

Case in point: in New Mexico there's a company named Titan Areospace. It makes drone aircraft. Not the kind that blow up people. Rather, the kind that drift up to high altitudes and hang out there for, say, five years or so.

And guess what? They're solar powered.

Titan just got bought by Google which is interested in the aircraft as alternatives to satellites for the delivery of wireless Internet (take that, Comcast! And Verizon!)

But Titan's drones would be impossible were it not for a host of new materials, new batteries, and new everything else. They are so bloody light, and so energy efficient, that they can cruise the skies, and do it all without a drop of jet fuel.


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It was ironic, really. For years I'd been waiting for a technological revolution in energy production…fusion, thorium fission, space-based power satellites…and all the while the revolution was coming from quite a different quarter, from materials science.

But, better late than never. I now more or less admit that "renewables" in general and solar in particular are going to be a major part of our energy future. I still think we ought to keep up work on things like fusion and space-based power and all that other stuff. I also still think that solar power advocates need to face up to just how hard it is going to be to build a solar powered economy. And I suspect that, yes, there will always be a need for big generators somewhere in the system, if only to provide for backup or to power industry.

But clearly, the sun is going to be a very big part of our energy future.

Now, that said…I also think that solar is going to be a disruptive technology. Maybe even as disruptive as computers were before them. Maybe more.

Which is to say that there will be people who fight it, and progress in general, tooth and nail.

But that's for next time…