An Aussie Visiting America - A futurist for a week

by: Unenergy

Wed Dec 30, 2009 at 00:00:00 AM EST

For a few years now I have been following the development of a number of renewable energy technologies. This is a keen interest of mine as my background has been predominantly in the power industry, and I of course am very concerned about the release of millions of years of stored carbon is having on the climate.
In August I visited the United States and as part of that trip, my intent was to stop at a number of solar company installations, preferably unannounced, to see whether what they were telling people was going on with their business, did actually reflect the reality on the ground.
This is what I saw, and my interpretation of where solar technology could be headed.

Unenergy :: An Aussie Visiting America - A futurist for a week

In about March of 2008 I had come across a technology concept called concentrated solar. This is where diffuse sunlight was collected either through the use of mirrors, often in the form of heliostats, or Fresnel lens, to focus or concentrate the sunlight from a large area to a small area.

I had also discovered that an Australian company was talking about a product they had been designing called a Sunball and Suncube, and it had been raising interest in the blogosphere. Previously I'd started a website and had done a little bit of preliminary research into alternative energy technologies, but hadn't really found one which I could hang my hat on which could be rolled out quickly in multiple markets and bring the price of solar generated electricity down to comparitive levels as fossil fuels.
Concentration technology, because it uses a much smaller amount of active material than silicon, or creates enough heat to create steam to turn a turbine without the combustion of a fuel, has the potential to achieve what others had failed to do.

I'd first heard of concentrating the sun to create heat way back when I was an apprentice at a coal fired power station and had started a correspondence course on Energy and Society. A couple of the books I'd read as part of the course covered something called parabolic trough technology.

"the answer is there in the row upon row of mirrors, steel frames, pipes and generators at Kramer Junction. It works. 'It's an alternative energy source. No one can fail to get excited about that,' Norris said. 'In the long run, this is the way we as a people should head. We're here on this planet for ever and we'd better take care of it. I feel this industry, right, is going to be the grandfather of what we're going to end up with. We're doing a good thing.'
The near 50 hectares of trough shaped collectors at Kramer Junction are not only proof that solar energy on a grand scale works; they also demonstrate how government policy, in this case of both the US Government and the Californian Government, can get things moving; taking a fledgling technology, encouraging private investors to invest what eventually totalled $1.25Billion, and fast-tracking the concept to the point where it was a viable, job-creating, clean source of electricity. Kramer Junction power station employs 125 people - managers, operators, maintenance staff... and mirror cleaners....
Page 51 The Big Switch, Clean energy for the 21st century, (c) 1994, Gavin Gilchrist

In Luz's design, the solar trough heats a working fluid that circulates to a power station where water is super heated into steam, which then powers an electricity producing turbine....The power plant built at Harper Lake, California, in the Mojave desert in 1989....produce enough power for about 170,000 homes for as little as 9ckWh ........unenergy comment:down from 29ckWh in 1984 in their pilot plant
But then this...
Unlike the tax breaks for the U.S. oil and gas industries, which amounted to $8.8 Billion in 1989, the federal solar tax credit required annual renewal. In 1989, Congress renewed the credits for 9 months instead of the normal 12, forcing Luz to finish its 1990 project 3 months earlier than planned and driving up costs. The final blow came a few months later when a faulty analysis led California's finance department to temporarily revoke the company's tax exemption, leading nervous investors-who had already put more than $1.25 Billion into Luz- to pull the plug.
Page 145/146 Power Surge (c)1995 Christopher Flavin, Nicholas Lenssen

So a new technology in 5 years had managed to move from pilot stage plant at a cost of 29ckWh to reduce costs down to 1/3rd of that, and remarkably two beauracratic decisions had created an artificial slump in investor confidence to shut down this technology from progressing further. Despite the level of promise it had shown in such a short time.

At the time, 1995, 1996, I was just learning about coal fired power stations, boilers, and turbines, but can remember thinking even back then what an amazing future we have coming up when 1900's technology which relies on burning clumps of coal, burning dirt, may eventually be replaced by the input only of the sun.

However it was not to be, as I have previously alluded there were forces at work behind the scenes to see that people and the planet were not as important as profit.
We knew how to profit, not how to protect

But discovering not only that there was new life being breathed into concentrated Solar power, had me incredibly excited about this future which I had read about and briefly wondered when it would begin to happen, all the way back in 1995.

Green and Gold Energy