Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [97]
chapter 20
Technology
THE TRUTH IS THAT the most important technological work done to capture solar energy during the 1970s didn’t come from the tool freaks. Instead, an oil company funded the research that enabled solar photovoltaic cells to get radically cheaper. Esso, which rebranded as Exxon in 1973, supported the work of Elliot Burman, a chemist who led the Solar Power Corporation’s efforts to cut the costs of solar energy. Under Burman’s leadership, the company drove down the cost of producing a solar module about an order of magnitude, from $100 per watt in 1970 to $10 per watt in 1973.1 The Solar Power Corporation successfully adapted what had become a space-bound technology for regular commercial operations on earth.
The Exxon team reexamined the entire solar module for cost efficiencies. First, they looked at the biggest material cost—the silicon—and switched to cheaper wafers rejected by the exploding semiconductor industry. Then they eliminated unnecessary steps in the processing of the silicon to waste less of the expensive stuff. Finally, they rethought the module encasement. For terrestrial applications, the modules just didn’t need to be as rugged, so cheaper materials could be used.
The development of Solar Power’s first module is a prototypical development venture. The key cost problems were identified and solved within the constraints imposed by the physics of the materials and the logic of the marketplace. Burman did exactly what many of the solar home builders and appropriate technologists could not: organize and execute an ambitious technological program to make solar power radically cheaper.
In so doing, Exxon brought the cost of solar down enough to find an actual marketplace in far-flung locations like oil rigs. It may not have been a large market, but it was big enough to keep companies interested in competing and developing the technologies further. The advances that came in the years following these big cost reductions proved to be of a different kind than what Burman was able to do so quickly.2
University of California Berkeley energy researcher Gregory Nemet found that the two largest factors in cost cutting between 1975 and 2001 were increases in the efficiency of modules in converting sunlight into electricity and capturing the economies of scale that come with building bigger plants. While scientific research may have continued to improve efficiencies without a market for photovoltaics, the scaling effects were made possible by the deep price drops brought about by the Solar Power Corporation and a select few other companies.
This is the promise of technological development. Advances lead to price drops, which encourage scaling, which leads to more price drops, and so on and so forth. “The cost of photovoltaics has declined by a factor of nearly 100 since the 1950s, more than any other energy technology during that period,” Nemet noted.
As we saw in the last chapter, even the most technology-friendly of the solar advocates of the era struggled with how to think about photovoltaics. Amory Lovins and the Whole Earth editors reported fairly wild-eyed projections about the possible arrival of “cheap photovoltaic cells,” but neither emphasizes them as an energy pathway. “This development may be imminent and should be closely watched,” Lovins wrote in Soft Energy Paths, “though the analysis in this book nowhere assumes this or any other solar-electric technology.” Much more important, Lovins thought, was the reduction of electricity use in general. 3 As noted, Whole Earth’s James T. Baldwin waffled on whether or not his readers should purchase photovoltaics, but he also