Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [63]
you will at once admit that any businessman who was approached several years ago with a view to purchasing stock in a flying machine company would have feared for the sanity of the proposer. And yet, after it has been shown conclusively that it can be done, there is now no difficulty in securing all the money that is wanted, and rapid progress in aviation is from now on assured. We will have to go through this same course with solar power and I am confident we will achieve the same success.32
Shuman’s pitch worked and he eventually built the world’s first solar power plant in 1912 in Meadi, Egypt. Its sixty-horsepower engine was used to pump six thousand gallons of water per minute to nearby cotton fields. World War I, however, put an end to his solar projects. Researchers like Farrington Daniels at the University of Wisconsin picked up solar research in the years after World War II.33 In particular, the design of parabolic collectors that could track the sun and selective coatings for capturing more solar energy drew attention in those years.34
Work began in earnest in the early 1970s and intensified after the energy shock of 1973. Aden and Marjorie Meinel proposed using solar farms consisting of parabolic troughs focusing the sun’s rays on a tube of energy-absorbing liquid, and multiple researchers explored the possibilities of different trough designs.35 Perhaps Luz’s closest ancestor was the Sandia National Laboratory’s Solar Total Energy Program, which, like a highly technical, government-funded version of Project Luz, imagined the growth of one thousand home communities that made the “maximum possible use of the energy collected by a system of solar collectors.”36
By 1981 a review by the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), later renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, found that after just a decade of research into solar concentrating technologies, they had a chance of becoming as inexpensive as the gas and coal plants used to produce power during times of peak load .37 But government solar programs were harshly criticized because most contracts went to big R&D and aerospace companies that, critics contend, never intended for solar energy to succeed.38 They did, however, produce valuable baseline cost and performance estimates that reduced the uncertainty associated with the technologies, even if it bogged down the “solar revolution” in endless bureaucratic technical reports. The greater problem was that bringing a technology to market is expensive and there was actually very little monetary support for solar thermal R&D. In 1981 SERI spent $11 million on solar thermal energy systems out of the lab’s total budget of $160 million. That same year, total civilian R&D expenditures by the government totaled $15.3 billion. The military spent an additional $17 billion. Given what government researchers and contractors had to work with, they provided a valuable service in generating information for the public domain on which entrepreneurs could build.
Public research, whatever its flaws, provided a map of the path of least resistance to commercializing solar power. The 1981 SERI review found that parabolic troughs were the most mature technology out there,39 and after a crazed six months, Kroizer had built a working prototype of a parabolic trough system on the roof of Luz’s Israel headquarters. The investors dropped by, re-upped, and Luz was on its way.
Their sales team fanned out across the American South, talking with textile factory owners and offering them energy at 10 percent less than they were paying, guaranteed, if they could spare about seven acres for the fields of mirrors. By the end of 1981 Luz had built two plants in Georgia and one in North Carolina with the help of investors enticed