Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [59]
It sounds complicated, but the principle isn’t very different from that used by little boys to torture ants with a magnifying glass: If you can capture and concentrate solar heat over a wide enough area, you can make anything get really hot. The Odeillo-Font-Romeau solar furnace in France, which was completed in 1970, is capable of generating temperatures of almost 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Trough power plants typically operate at far lower temperatures.3
The world knows the trough technology works thanks to the pioneering efforts of the only company to commercialize large-scale solar power in the twentieth century, Luz International. From the mid-1980s through 1990 the company built nine Solar Electric Generating Stations (SEGS) in the Mojave Desert, which have a combined peak capacity of 354 megawatts. The last two projects, each 80 megawatts, remain the largest solar plants in the United States. It’s impossible to imagine a solar thermal industry without Luz’s efforts.
A National Renewable Energy Lab analyst found that “The SEGS experience has been crucial and invaluable as a basis [for] what is happening today. Luz deserves great credit for its contribution to jumpstarting this technology.”4 Even today, the Department of Energy’s Web page explaining the parabolic trough solar thermal technology notes, “Luz system collectors represent the standard by which all other collectors are compared.”5
Beyond the hardware, the experience that engineers gained at the SEGS plants is the basis for the entire industry. One NREL report found that all the companies offering trough power plants in the market in 2005 had “ties through equipment and expertise to the SEGS plants.”6
Three of the largest and most promising solar thermal players, Abengoa, Solel, and BrightSource Energy, are intimately tied to the Luz experience. Abengoa’s vice president of technology development, Hank Price, was chief engineer at the SEGS.7 Solel grew out of the ashes of Luz and drew directly from the technical knowledge base created at the original company before being purchased by Siemens for $418 million in October 2009.8
Then there is BrightSource, which is so much a part of the original vision that it was once known as Luz II, even if they have decided to use a different solar plant arrangement. Arnold Goldman, Luz’s founder, is its chairman, and his first engineering hire, Israel Kroizer, serves as BrightSource’s chief operating officer. Thirty former Luz employees now work for BrightSource.
Luz is the seed from which an entire industry has sprung. Whether concentrating solar power becomes “the technology that will save humanity,” as energy policy analyst Joe Romm has anointed it, remains to be seen, but it’s going to be a major part of any green tech–heavy future. 9 Yet the company’s success is so improbable, so stupendously unlikely that it makes one wonder what options the world would be looking at if it hadn’t been for Arnold Goldman’s preposterous vision of a solar-powered world.
Arnold Goldman is exactly what one might expect an engineer-visionary to look like. He’s small and a little round, with a beard that tracks his jaw line. He wears no moustache and he tends to talk quietly, except when he breaks out into peals of laughter. He laughed the hardest when I asked him how many people thought he was crazy when he told them what Luz was going to do. Everyone, he said.10
They might have been right. The audacity of Goldman’s original plans boggle the mind in a green-tech world awash in Johnny-comelatelys looking for fast money in a growth industry. His company grew out of nothing less than a plan to construct a solar-powered utopia just outside Jerusalem. After selling his Los Angeles–based word processing company in the late ’70s, he had moved to the ancient city with his wife and three children. He wanted some time off to clear his mind