Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [99]
The decidedly anti-establishment stance of many solar proponents prevented them from seeing that they would have to use the corporations to achieve a broad range of good, less expensive solar products. After all, the alternative technology groups of the day produced nothing comparable to the large-scale technological project that the improvement of photovoltaic cells has been.
In silicon, researchers developed all kinds of manufacturing tricks and research knowledge about the material itself. In what are known as “thin-film” solar cells, which use far less material than silicon, researchers identified and began to experiment with the main materials that are now considered commercially interesting today: cadmium telluride, copper indium gallium selenide, amorphous silicon, and so forth.“The [cost] that has been reached also required a progression of substantial and creative R&D improvement in materials, devices, fabrication, characterization, and processing, leading to better device performance and reliability, and lowered systems costs,” wrote Larry Kazmerski in 2006, a photovoltaics researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for thirty years.8
Changes of this magnitude would not have been possible without long-term research programs executed by high-level scientists and engineers, exactly the sorts of people who made the counterculture solar advocates cringe. Nonetheless, the work of those scientist-stiffs has now changed the economics that underlie all kinds of solar advocacy.
The point, perhaps, is that the desire to use renewable energy, even in the 1970s, could be separated out from the counterculture. Although we might remember solar as being the province of hippies, it was far more widespread than that, and many more types of people made contributions to what is now almost ubiquitously referred to as the “clean energy future.”
Take, for example, the husband-and-wife astronomer team Aden and Marjorie Meinel. They traveled the nation promoting their idea of a massive thousand-gigawatt, five thousand–square mile National Solar Power Facility. They hoped that the plants would be finished by 2076, at which point the facility would be producing the entire nation’s electricity needs at a constant five cents a kilowatt hour, or about what people paid for power in most parts of the country. It was an attention-grabbing scheme. “A pollution-free energy system that could supply the whole nation with all the power it needs forever could be set up in the Arizona-California desert,” one newspaper wrote in December 1970.9
The Meinels were advocating what might be called a “hard solar” energy path—and they meant it to be matched to the scale of the U.S. economy. Where the appropriate technologists and solar transcendentalists tried to sever as many ties to the industrial world as they could, the Meinels’ key insight was that solar could scale up faster if it found the right conduits into the existing technological systems that distributed power. They imagined a solar thermal power system much like the ones built by Luz International in the 1980s (see chapter 14) and many more companies in recent years. Parabolic mirrors would focus the sun’s rays on thin, liquid-filled tubes suspended at just the right spot. Each tube would be coated with selectively absorbent materials, which would trap heat inside. The heated liquid would then be used to generate steam, which could turn a turbine just like in a traditional fossil fuel or nuclear power plant. “This isn’t a new electricity system,” Marjorie Meinel stressed to the Associated Press in 1972. “It’s a new fuel source for generators that already exist.”10
The scale of the project would have required more than three million acres of land. Huge aqueducts would have had