Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [66]
And why not? Goldman asked himself. Why couldn’t technology solve the problem of generating electricity without generating pollution?
During his time in the computer technology world, he had seen the power of the peculiar technological faith that underpinned Moore’s Law, a famous dictum that the number of transistors and, hence, available computing power that could be put on a chip would double every eighteen months or so.
Though Kevin Kelly would likely disagree, there is no particular reason that Moore’s Law be any kind of “law” at all. It’s no more written in the universe than a man-law from a beer commercial. At first, it was just a tendency of the technology, but as it held, it became a core belief of the semiconductor companies and they organized to maintain it. Goldman said that
there was no reason that Moore’s Law should have been able to happen, but people believed it. If you were dealing with that as some bureaucrat, you’d never be able to take it seriously. But it was an outgrowth of people believing—the different kinds of machines, technologies, mathematics, massive stuff that feeds a vision that has modified the world in incredible ways.55
And Goldman believed. “I came from that environment and I bought into that learning curve.”
It required, one might say, faith. “Arnold is a mystic,” said Michael Lotker, the former vice president of Business Development of Luz turned Rabbi who wrote the defining report on Luz’s corporate legacy.56 “He really had the interest of the world at heart.” Although Goldman read critics of technology like Lewis Mumford as well as techno-optimists like Herman Kahn, he preferred the philosophy of humanist Eric Fromm and author Joseph Chilton Pierce, who, he believed, showed that people could “blend the knowledge and experience gained in industrial revolutions to understand and control their lives,” Goldman wrote. “It is the belief of this group of people that the knowledge and technologies gained thus far can be utilized to advance man to a new level of wholeness.”57 Luz was the expression of this peculiar kind of considered technological faith: Industrial infrastructure could better humanity, and technology could work for humans and not the other way around.
The company’s string of triumphs, and access to investors, made Luz a very prominent member of the solar industry. It was basically the only large solar company. This was tough because it couldn’t bank on an ecosystem of companies to purchase the components of plants like mirrors and solar receivers from their suppliers; instead, Luz had to support an entire value chain of companies all on its own. It was also responsible for lobbying on behalf of an entire type of energy that had few friends in high places during the Reaganite ‘80s.58 During that time, energy prices were low as the malaise of the 1970s had been postponed.
So lobby it did. Luz representatives appeared before Congress a half dozen times during the company’s run.59 Two issues consumed most of their time. First, the solar investment tax credits were extended year by year. This meant that planning long-term was difficult for Luz. The company asked time and again: Why not provide long-term guidance? Second, the cap on the size of the facility they could build really began to hurt Luz. All thermal power plants work better at larger sizes. This scale law is why fossil fuel plants are rarely built any smaller than a few hundred megawatts these days. Luz had been limited to thirty-megawatt plants until 1987 and then eighty megawatt plants thereafter. But why have a limit at all? By 1989 Luz was convinced that if they could build a power plant of normal size, they could be cost competitive with natural gas as soon as the plant was built. In 1989 Joshua Bar-Lev, Luz’s general counsel, argued before the Senate that
in five years we have brought our costs down. In five years we have shown that we can build on time,