Switching to Solar: What We Can Learn from Germany's Success in Harnessing Clean Energy
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Switching to Solar: What We Can Learn from Germany's Success in Harnessing Clean Energy
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781616142223 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Globe Pequot |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2010 |
| Pages: | 402 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Bob Johnstone (Melbourne, Australia) is the author of Brilliant!: Shuji Nakamura and the Revolution in Lighting Technology; We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age; and Never Mind the Laptops: Kids, Computers, and the Transformation of Learning. He has also contributed numerous articles on technology to Forbes, Nature, New Scientist, MIT Technology Review, Wired, and the Far Eastern Economic Review.
Read an Excerpt
Switching to Solar
What We Can Learn from Germany's Success in HARNESSING CLEAN ENERGYBy Bob Johnstone
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2011 Bob JohnstoneAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61614-222-3
Chapter One
A MOST EXCITING ADVENTURE
Larry Kazmerski did not hesitate: he had to prevent the president of the United States from killing himself.
Jimmy Carter had designated May 3, 1978, as Sun Day, "to inform the general public, industry, and labor about solar technologies and to demonstrate the sun's potential in meeting America's energy needs." Now here he was, the chief executive himself, on the appointed day—a Wednesday, as it happened—visiting the brand-new US national Solar Energy Research Institute. The site chosen for SERI was a rocky mesa at the base of South Table Mountain just outside Golden, Colorado, home of Coors Beer and the last resting place of William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody. Predictably, the sun was refusing to cooperate. In fact, as Kazmerski, then a young researcher who was the as-yet-unbuilt laboratory's first specialist in photovoltaic solar cells, recalled, "The day President Carter arrived, the weather changed, the sleet and snow were coming down—it was just miserable out there."
Carter had made it clear that he wanted to actually see things. Problem was, the lab was so new there was hardly anything to show him. Somehow at short notice the staff had rustled up a few bits and pieces. On his tour of the hastily assembled equipment, the raincoat-clad chief executive paused to inspect a solar array, borrowed at short notice from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Back then, these things weren't sealed so well, and here's our president reaching out to wipe away some of the snow off this array," Kazmerski told me. "I grabbed his hand because I thought, My God—we might have the first president here electrocuted from photovoltaics!"
Not that Carter, a US Navy-trained nuclear engineer, was ignorant about solar energy or its potential. Like many people, the president had obviously been captivated by this space-age technology, which promised to help deliver the nation from its dependence on imported oil. "Nobody can embargo sunlight," Carter declared pointedly in his speech to the sodden audience that day. "No cartel controls the sun. Its energy will not run out."
Until the early seventies most Americans had taken energy for granted. Back in the sixties a joke had done the rounds ofWashington wonks. It went, Q: What's our national energy policy? A: Pray for mild weather! That attitude changed forever on October 16, 1973, when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries hiked the price of oil 70 percent. The next day the Arab states placed an oil embargo on the United States as punishment for resupplying Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The cartel quickly extended its ban to Western Europe and Japan. Almost immediately lines of irate motorists began forming outside gas stations.
Suddenly energy policy was a hot topic. In 1974 the Ford Foundation produced an influential report entitled A Time to Choose: America's Energy Future. Among its recommendations, the authors of the five-hundred-page study asserted that energy conservation and renewables were viable alternatives to finite fossil fuels like oil. They should be taken seriously. "Solar energy is the world's most abundant renewable energy resource," the report stated. Solar cells were "on the threshold of rapid technological advancement." A much stronger push was accordingly required: "the government solar energy R&D program should provide the funding to develop the requisite infrastructure in industry, the national labs, and the universities to create a base from which rapid development of the technology can take place."
The report's lead author was David Freeman, a feisty engineer-turned-lawyer from Tennessee who had been an advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Freeman made a point of sending a copy of his report to the governor of each state. One went to Carter, who was then governor of Georgia. During the presidential campaign, Freeman would author statements on energy for the candidate. His report became the blueprint for the Carter administration's energy policy.
Another influential voice at this time was that of Amory Lovins. In October 1976 the twenty-nine-year-old physicist-turned-Friends-of-the-Earth-activist published a provocative essay entitled "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" in Foreign Affairs magazine. In it Lovins laid out a "soft" path based on energy conservation and renewable energy sources such as solar, as an alternative to the "hard" path of centralized power generation based on fossil fuels and nuclear. His ideas were widely embraced, not least by Jimmy Carter. In October 1977 the president invited Lovins to the White House to discuss energy policy.
Carter had arrived in Washington determined to make energy an urgent priority. In April 1977, during his first hundred days in office, the new chief executive outlined his proposals in a televised fireside chat. Wearing his trademark beige cardigan, Carter began by warning an anxious nation. "I want to have an unpleasant talk with you," he said. Unpleasant, because Carter knew that many of his proposals—especially those that involved personal sacrifice, people having to cut back on their energy usage—would be unpopular. "This difficult effort"—winning independence from imported energy—"will be 'the moral equivalent of war,'" the president asserted.
There had been two previous transitions in the way people used energy, Carter continued. The first, about two hundred years before, was from wood to coal, the motive force of the Industrial Revolution. The second, in the early part of the twentieth century, was from coal to oil, the enabler of the automobile age. Now, Carter argued, "because we are running out of oil, we must prepare for a third change." This would involve "strict conservation"—hence personal sacrifice—"the use of coal" (few concerns about global warming back then), and "permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power."
A new Department of Energy would be created (in October 1977) to coordinate the implementation of government policy in this area. Carter concluded by listing some fundamental principles and specific goals. Principles included the government taking responsibility for energy policy and ensuring that its policies were predictable. Without consistent government support—an idea that under his successor, Ronald Reagan, would suddenly and dramatically go out of fashion—nothing much would happen. Goals included the use of "solar energy in more than 2.5 million houses" by 1985.
In this context the term "solar energy" meant mostly the older technology of solar water heaters. In June 1979 Carter had a solar heater consisting of thirty-two panels installed on the roof of the West Wing of the White House. "A generation from now this solar heater could either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken," Carter said at its dedication, referring to Lovins's tract. "Or, it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people."
"In the year 2000 the solar water heater ... will still be here, supplying cheap efficient energy," Carter predicted. He was mistaken. In 1986 during the Reagan administration the system would be dismantled and removed, supposedly to fix the roof underneath. The panels were never replaced. But "solar energy" also included the much newer technology of photovoltaic cells for the direct conversion of sunlight into electricity. Such cells could be competitive with conventional sources like coal as early as 1990, Carter had told the staff of the solar institute in Colorado. "We know that [solar energy] works," he said, preaching to the converted. "The only question is how to cut costs so that solar power can be used more widely."
This was not the first time that the thorny question of how to reduce the high cost of photovoltaics had been posed, nor would it be the last. For the moment, however, the solution that Carter proposed was the logical one. "The government will speed this program by increasing demand for solar hardware, so that mass production can help to bring prices down." In addition, to expedite the spread of residential solar systems, over the next seven years the federal government would offer more than a billion dollars in tax credits, up to $2,000 per homeowner. A national Solar Energy Development Bank would be established with annual funding of $100 million to make available financing, at reasonable terms, for solar investments in residential and commercial buildings.
To get his radical energy legislation through Congress, Carter had to fight what he later described as "bloody battles." Many of his hard-won outcomes would not last past the mideighties. During the Reagan Revolution, government procurement of photovoltaics would be slashed, the tax credits for renewables phased out, and the Solar Bank demolished. For many years Carter would be regarded as a head-in-the-clouds idealist whose energy policies had failed. But with the passage of time other, more favorable views would increasingly be voiced. "I don't think there's been a president like Carter before or after him," an admiring David Freeman told an interviewer in 2003. "[H]e was no politician and didn't pretend to be one, but he did what he thought was right. And he was right a lot of the time."
"If we'd done what Jimmy Carter wanted us to do," Freeman told me, "we wouldn't have climate change now."
In June 1979 President Carter delivered a message to Congress, his last major policy pronouncement on solar energy. In it Carter recommended that the United States should commit to an ambitious national goal of meeting 20 percent of its energy needs with solar and other renewable resources (including hydropower) by the turn of the century. At this time the US economy was reeling from the impact of the interruptions to the oil supply that followed the Iranian Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini. Just a few weeks earlier the partial core meltdown of a reactor at a supposedly "accident-proof" nuclear plant, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, had thrown the future of nuclear energy into doubt.
Crises tend to galvanize people. During the 1980s forest dieback from acid rain caused by emissions from coal-fired power stations and the nuclear catastrophe of Chernobyl would lead directly to the rise of photovoltaics in Germany. In California the chaotic aftermath of the botched deregulation in the electricity industry ensured that energy would remain a key issue in that state. It would thus be reasonable to suppose that the US solar industry emerged in response to challenges posed by the oil crises. Reasonable, perhaps, but that is not what actually happened: the dates don't match.
In fact, while the nascent PV industry derived considerable, albeit short-lived, benefits from federal and state governments during the 1970s and early '80s, its origins derive from an entirely different dynamic. To wit, as Jimmy Carter put it on that miserable day in Colorado, from "private enterprise, individual initiative, and the inventive genius of the United States." In particular, the drive and persistence of four doughty entrepreneurs—Elliot Berman, Joseph Lindmayer and Peter Varadi, and Bill Yerkes—who would found the solar industry's three most seminal firms. These were determined men who made gutsy calls, took big risks with their careers, their families, their homes, in short, with everything they had, to bring forth something new and different. Before we meet these exceptional individuals, first let us take a brisk stroll through the invention and early history of the solar cell.
* * *
Tapping the limitless energy of the sun was an idea that had long beguiled scientists and inventors. Thomas Edison, the man who had almost single-handedly invented electric power generation, transmission, and distribution, was disgusted by the profligate practice of burning finite oil and coal to produce electricity, "this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire," in his scathing words. "We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel," Edison grumbled, "when we should be using nature's inexhaustible sources of energy—sun, wind, and tide." For the future, Edison's money was on the sun: "What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait till oil and coal run out before we tackle that."
Jimmy Carter was correct to say that solar cells were a proven technology. When the first oil crisis struck in 1973, the solar cell was already nearly twenty years old. The photovoltaic effect—electricity generated by exposing a material to light—was discovered in 1839 by a French prodigy, nineteen-year-old Edmund Becquerel, while doing experiments at the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. The reason for the transformation remained a mystery until 1905. In that year the twenty-five-year-old über-prodigy Albert Einstein published a paper that explained light consisted of energetic particles, what we now call photons. It was for his explanation of the photovoltaic effect (and not for his much harder-to-understand work on relativity) that Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921.
Upon striking a suitably prepared material, photons dislodge electrons, which can then be marshaled to form an electric current (see appendix). Early photovoltaic devices employed a light-sensitive metallic element called selenium. But selenium was inefficient, able at best to convert only 1 percent of incident light. This piddling amount sufficed for photosensors, such as the switches used to turn street lamps on and off, and the light meters used to gauge exposure in cameras. For broader applications, photovoltaics would have to become much better convertors.
The breakthrough that would catapult the solar cell from niche to mainstream was made at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Bell Labs was one of the great research powerhouses that made American industry the envy of the postwar world. The labs' mission was long term: to develop technologies that would be useful to the telephone system in twenty years. To this end Bell hired the best scientists then let them loose to follow their instincts. Researchers were encouraged to work in small, casually formed interdisciplinary teams of physicists, chemists, and engineers. In 1947 one such trio had invented the transistor. First-generation transistors were made of germanium. By the early fifties the limitations of this material were apparent. The focus of research switched to developing transistors made of silicon, an abundant element commonly found in sand.
Though it depended on a fundamental understanding of materials science, the transistor was developed to solve a practical problem—namely, to replace the unreliable vacuum tubes in the amplifiers that Bell positioned along its lines every few miles to boost telephone signals. Another item the phone company wanted replaced was the dry-cell batteries it used to power amplifiers located in tropical regions like Florida. Batteries were unreliable. Humidity caused their terminals to corrode, shortening their working life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Switching to Solar by Bob Johnstone Copyright © 2011 by Bob Johnstone. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
INTRODUCTION....................11NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY....................19
11. A Most Exciting Adventure....................23
12. To Hell with the Generals....................35
13. Cells and Gasoline....................47
14. Camel with the Fridge on Top....................57
15. Skunk the Government....................65
16. End of "Solar Socialism"....................77
17. Like a Snowball Down a Mountainside....................87
18. Alpha Male....................97
19. Glorious SMUD....................105
10. Beware the Camel's Nose....................115
11. Land of the Rising Solar....................123
12. Leaving the Army to Fight....................135
13. A Persuasive Demonstration....................147
14. Solar Proliferator....................155
15. Escape from STAWAG....................167
16. Electricity Rebels....................177
17. An Ecological Masterpiece....................183
18. Making of Solar Valley....................197
19. Catching Rays in Fog Town....................211
20. Solar's Not for Sissies....................221
21. A Tale of Two Cities....................235
22. FIT USA?....................245
23. Exit Hippies, Enter Stanford MBAs....................259
24. Good Soldiers....................275
25. Mirrors without Smoke....................283
26. Ballad of a Thin Film....................293
27. Efficiency, Efficiency, Efficiency....................305
28. Accidental Emperor....................317
29. Nano Solar....................325
EPILOGUE: NO SWITCHING BACK....................331
APPENDIX: Magic Crystals: A Nonscientist's Guide to How Solar Cells Work....................335
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................337
SOURCES....................339
INDEX....................371
What People are Saying About This
"Progress on the climate and energy front will require doing everything better -- more sensible transport, more efficient factories and homes, cleaner forms of today's 'dirty' energy sources, and much fuller use of inexhaustible energy from the sun. Bob Johnstone has the technical background, the reportorial curiosity and energy, and the descriptive skill to explain just how much is possible on this front, based on his reports from Germany, California, China, and elsewhere. Anyone who cares about the world's energy future will benefit from reading this book." --(James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic, author, and former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter)
"Bob Johnstone's book Switching to Solar is an extremely well-researched and well-written work guiding the reader from Becquerel's invention in 1839, Einstein's Nobel Prize in 1921, Chapin's discovery at Bell Labs in 1953, through 1973 when people started to learn how to spell photovoltaic, to today, when the market capitalization of one of the solar company's listed on the US stock market is more than twice the market capitalization of the oil company Sunoco." --(Dr. Peter F. Varadi was the co-founder of Solarex Corporation. ln 2004 he received the European PV lndustry Association's Bonda Prize)
"Bob Johnstone is surely right about the future importance of solar power, and he explores its prospects and potential in a compelling, accessible, and appealingly positive way. This book deserves to be widely read." --(Bill Emmott, international author and writer, former editor of The Economist)