Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [134]
Take the size of power plants, for example. Conventional wisdom has been to build the biggest plant possible in order to wring a little more electricity out of the plant’s steam. Bigger plants technically work better, so fossil fuel plants grew through most of the twentieth century. The biggest plant in 1903 could put out five megawatts of electrical power. By the 1970s the largest plant stood at 1,300 megawatts—growth of 26,000 percent.15 Countercultural environmentalists reacted against the increasing centralization and scale, arguing for the deployment of millions of small devices to make power closest to where it’s used (see chapters 18 and 19).
The company eSolar settled on a smallish but modular plant size: forty-six megawatts. The odd size shows that Gross wasn’t picking ideas off the shelf; instead, he rethought the requirements of power plants in today’s market and compared them with the types of business factors that would impact the company’s ability to deploy as quickly as possible. They optimized for speed to market as much as for efficiency.16
The Federal Aviation Administration requires that towers over two hundred feet go through an arduous permitting process, so that became the hard limit for the tower’s height. In addition, eSolar wanted to have a smaller footprint so that they could locate their plants closer to transmission lines in order to avoid the problems that companies like BrightSource are having with environmental opposition out in the Mojave desert.
Some of eSolar’s competitors thought they were nuts to build such small plants. Bob Fishman, CEO of a solar thermal competitor, Ausra, dismissed eSolar’s approach. “I’ve looked at it, and I can tell you right now, there’s a direct correlation between size and cost. If they want to build 30-megawatt plants, they can have at it,” lectured Fishman, a longtime utility executive in 2008. “They’re not going to change the laws of physics.”17
But it turns out, building the plants around their business model instead of the other way around might have been a smart decision. Other companies have struggled to bring their demonstration plants online, even if they’ve been able to land big contracts with California utilities. Because eSolar needs only 250 acres per plant, it’s easier to snap up and build on land that’s been used for some other purpose like farming. As a result, eSolar is now a clear leader in the solar thermal space. In 2010 eSolar landed a $5 billion, first-of-its-kind deal to build two gigawatts worth of power plants in China and a one-gigawatt deal in India.
Ausra, for its part, laid off employees in early 2009 and was purchased by the French energy giant Areva in 2010.18
THE DREAMSCAPE OF INVENTORS
Computing power won’t just change the operation of renewable energy plants. Software has transformed fundamental scientific research in the underrated branch of chemistry known as materials science. The history of energy technologies is built atop the history of the materials that were available for their construction. The characteristics and performance of materials like iron or glass, as determined by their molecular architecture, are the raw materials on which inventors and engineers imaginations’ feed and build. As no small number of historically oriented materials scientists have pointed out: Materials have been so important to civilization that we’ve tended to class epochs of humanity (the Bronze Age, etc.) by their use.19
The introduction of steel, goosed by materials scientists like Henry Bessamer, underpinned the creation of today’s turbine and internal combustion engine–heavy energy system. The development of better steel alloys, which allowed the construction of bigger and hotter running power plants, was a major component of the tremendous drops in the cost of producing electricity over the last century.20
Whereas the increasing efficiency enabled by turbines wiped