Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [42]
These early hot water heaters were not sophisticated. The first, which predated the Climax, were simply bare metal tanks turned to face the sun. Kemp’s invention incorporated the principles of the hot box. He put his water tanks inside a pine box fronted with glass. The glass trapped the heat from the sun like a car does when it’s left in a Los Angeles parking lot.10 The big problem was that if a person wanted to take a shower at night, she couldn’t. That was the problem Bailey set out to solve—and he did.
His system used the natural tendency of hot water to rise—because it’s lighter—and cold water to fall. The series of pipes he called “Sun Coils” circulated water through the pipes purely through the movement induced by solar heating. The hotter water eventually moved into a storage tank that was placed above the flat, glass-covered collector. The colder water fell and was circulated through the system again.11
If Scotty’s Castle was and is one of the stranger places on earth, with its soaring turrets and swimming pool and handcarved furniture transplanted to what remains the middle of nowhere, the Day and Night hot water heater installation was a pretty standard job. Sadly, however, that sale was one of the last the Day and Night Solar Heater Company would make.
Day and Night’s solar heaters had competed well against other hot water systems—usually just one’s stove—that burned coal or gas manufactured from coal. With California far from the deep coal seams of the East, transportation costs made the fossil fuels expensive.12 Beginning early in the century, though, gas started to get cheaper. One reason for this was that gas manufacturing plants began to be built increasingly larger. Through classic economies of scale, the gas that left the plants was cheaper than at smaller, less efficient plants. However, as big plants needed lots of capital and big markets, the gas industry began to consolidate. From 1902 to 1920 the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which operates in northern California, doubled its gas output and miles of pipeline, and near Los Angeles, the Southern Counties Gas Company was completing a similar consolidation.13
At the same time, the discovery and subsequent exploitation of huge deposits of natural gas in southern California helped flip the energy economics around. Standard Oil, of Rockefeller fame, hit the gas well equivalent of a gusher in the Midway oil field near Bakersfield in 1909.14 With the new supply, the gas companies expanded their pipeline networks to reach most of the major towns in California, mirroring the electrical grid in the state. By 1929 Pacific Lighting controlled a vast network of subterranean steel pushing natural gas around the southern half of the state at high pressure.15
The cheaper natural resource combined with better transmission made solar more expensive than gas. To make matters worse, the overabundance of gas in the still-young state had the natural gas companies hunting for markets for their fuel. To oil companies, natural gas was a waste product of drilling for the real crude. In the early twentieth century 90 percent of the nation’s oil-related natural gas was burned simply to get rid of it.16 So the gas companies subsidized the up-front cost of the gas water heaters in hopes of growing the natural gas market.17 Given how much gas was being wasted, finding ways to get consumers to use natural gas was, to the mind of Standard Oil’s Frederick Hillman, “in the spirit of conservation.”18
Bailey, a good businessman, saw this happening and introduced a new