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Review: In The Court of the Crimson Kings (Steve Stirling) The Era of Solar Energy - 1986 to ? Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. Here is my comment section. |
This was inspired by some notes I came across that I made in 1979 or 1980. At that point I was very young, naïve, and thoroughly convinced that solar power was the wave of the near future. Here are the notes:
Notes from 1979 – Solar Cells: · 1972: 50 to 70,000 peak watts production. $50 per peak watt · 1979: Solarex 1 Megawatt $7 to 10 per peak watt, rest of US industry, 1 Megawatt. Future: · Solarex – new plant: 2.5 megawatt production, 5 megawatt capacity plant – semi-crystalline silicon-estimated selling cost $5 to 7 per peak watt – sometime in 1980 · Heliotronic (subsidiary of Wacker-Chemotronic GnbH – supplying samples of 10 cm by 10 cm polysilicon-efficiency over 10%-hopes to cut price to 25 cents/Watt within 5 to 8 years by mass production · Institute of Energy Conversion (independent development group at University of Delaware) has cadmium sulfide cell at 9.5% efficiency, says they could be selling by 35 cents per watt by 1982. Trying to line up five independent companies to build plants under license.
By the year 2000, however, photovoltaics will have overtaken solar thermal as the fastest-growing segment. By then, the Department of Energy figures that all forms of solar energy will supply about 20% of the nation's total needs. By the DOE's ways of reckoning, that includes not only photovoltaics and solar thermal, but also such solar-related sources as hydroelectric, biomass and wind energy. But photovoltaics and solar thermal, but also such solar-related sources as hydroelectric, biomass and wind energy. But photovoltaics and solar thermal, in the year 2000, will account for 35% of solar's total."
In 1979 and 1980 it looked as though solar and renewable energy really was on the edge of taking off. The price of oil just kept going up. Natural gas for home heating was going up more slowly, but everyone figured that was because of government price controls. When those came off, home heating costs would skyrocket, and solar thermal energy would take off. Solar cells weren't quite there yet, but there were a lot of promising technologies in the hopper and DOE was predicting a ten-fold drop in solar cell prices—from around $6 per watt in 1980 to around 50 cents in 1986. Dollars in 1980 were worth around 2.63 times as much as 2008 dollars, so in current dollars that would have meant solar cells for around $1.31. As my notes suggest, several individual companies and institutions were making even more optimistic predictions. Well, the solar revolution didn't happen in the 1980s, for a variety of reasons which we'll get into later. The talk of a huge solar future started to look overly optimistic rather quickly. For some reason I kept an article dated June 1982. From the print style I think was from Solar Age, though the page I kept doesn't say. It has bad news. Total US solar cell production in 1981 was a little over 2 Megawatts according to one source. Production had declined for the second six-month period in a row.
What happened to the solar revolution? Well, part of the problem was expectations. The decline was actually short-lived. Production started back up once the loss of big federal purchases worked its way through the system, but rate of growth was nowhere near enough to turn solar cells into the major source of electricity the hype said it would become. At the same time, even in the dark times of the early 1980s, growth was impressive. Here are some figures from the beginning and end of each of the last several US presidential administrations: 1976: Last year of the Ford Administration (Republican) World Production: 2 megawatts US Production: .3 megawatts US % of World: 16% ------------------------------- 1980: Last year of the Carter Administration (Democrat) World Production: 7 megawatts US Production: 2.5 megawatts US % of World: 35.71 1988: Last year of the Reagan Administration (Republican) World Production: 34 megawatts US Production: 11.1 megawatts US % of World: 32.65% 1992: Last year of the Bush Administration (Republican) World Production: 58 megawatts US Production: 18.1 megawatts US % of World: 31.21% 2000: Last year of the Clinton Administration (Democrat) World Production: 277 megawatts US Production: 75 megawatts US % of World: 27.08% 2006: Last year I have figures for the Bush II Administration (Republican) World Production: 2521 megawatts US Production: 201 megawatts US % of World: 8% ------------------------------ So what does that all mean? The industry has grown very respectably under every administration, but not as fast as the intial hype predicted. The US percent of world manufacturing peaked under the Carter administration, but stayed in the 30-45% range for the most part until Germany instituted a massive subsidy program in the laste 1990s. That boosted German production to the highest in the world. In the last years of the Clinton administration US market share shrank fast--from a peak of 44.78% in 1995 to 27.8% in 2000. Under Bush II, that decline in US market share continued, with the US market share hitting 8% in 2006. In their defense, the US industry grew at a healthy rate in both administrations. The world industry just grew much faster. .Production declined slightly in the last year of the first Reagan administration and the first two years of the second Reagan administration, but more than offset that decline in the fourth year of that administration. .The biggest single year-to-year decline happened in the first Bush Jr. administration, when the second largest US solar cell maker at the time (AstroPower) went bankrupt. Based on limited information, that appears to have been mainly a matter of bad management on the part of AstroPower. They went public, built a fancy headquarters, and otherwise overextended themselves, then compounded the problem by including production ordered but not shipped in their sales figures. The word got out. The stock tanked. They ran out of money. As I mentioned earlier, as a percentage of world production US production bounced around considerably, then fell off of a cliff starting in the second Clinton administration and declining at an accelerating rate during the Bush Jr administrations. In both of those administrations, US production actually grew at a respectable pace, nearly doubling in four years. It's just that production outside the US grew much faster. If you compare the rate of growth of US production to non-US production, the US grew fastest relative to the rest of the world in the Carter administration, 2.23 times as fast. The two Reagan administrations were a mixed bag. The US industry grew very slightly faster than the rest of the world in the first Reagan administration and about 10% slower in the second. Under Papa Bush, the industry grew about 4% slower than the rest of the world. Under the first LClinton administration, the US industry grew fast, 41% faster than the rest of the world. In the second Clinton administration, grew at only 62% of the rate of the rest of the world. By the end of the Clinton years, the US industry's market share was barely over 27%, lower than it had been since early in the Carter administration. Under Bush Jr, US market share shrank even more, into the single digits. US production grew at less than half the rate of non-US production—43 percent. The first two years of the second Bush administration were a little better, with US production growing at 69% of the world rate. That's better than his first four years, and actually better than Clinton's last 4 years, but it still means that US market share is continuing to shrink. Why the drop in US market share? As I mentioned earlier, the main reason is that the German market and more recently the Spanish market has grown due to a kind of subsidy called a "Feed In Tariff". Basically utilities guarantee that they will pay a certain rate for electricity from solar cells for the next x number of years. The rate is set high enough for electricity from the cells to be profitable. The rate for new solar power coming on line goes down at a certain percentage every year until the subsidy goes away. Theoretically, by then solar cells will have become cheap enough to compete without the subsidy. For some reason, neither party in the US is talking about Feed In Tariffs. They do argue over a 25% federal income tax rebate which usually gets renewed every year after enough political squabbling to drive away anyone trying to make long term plans for solar power. (By the way, the production figures come from: Earth Policy Institute from Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs 2005 (Washington, DC: 2005); Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs 2007-2008 (Washington DC: 2007); Prometheus Institute, "23rd Annual Data Collection - Final," PVNews, vol. 26, no. 4 (April 2007), pp. 8-9; REN21, Renewables 2007 Global Status Report: A Pre-Publication Summary for the UNFCCC COP13 (Paris: December 2007). The percentages and conclusions are mine, as are any mistakes in those calculations.
Natural Gas costs actually fell quite a bit too when price controls were lifted, surprisingly enough. Solar cells were competing against gas or diesel fired generators for a lot of their business, and lower oil costs hit them hard. The solar heating industry got hit harder, and essentially went away in most areas.
The Reagan administrations didn't help matters by reducing solar research and commercialization efforts. The big federal solar buys went away, leaving the solar cell companies on their own. Surprisingly, a lot of companies made it, but they didn't have a lot of money for research or for expansion. The first Bush administration did increase solar cell research funds, but nowhere near enough to restore the Reagan cuts.
None of that would have mattered except for three other problems. First, the technology was oversold. For example, if cadmium sulfide solar cells had really been ready for production in 1982 at 35 cents a watt, they would have found a market even without government help. Unfortunately, they weren't really ready. They worked in the lab, but had stability problems that kept them from mass production. The organization that was planning to license the technology is still around, but they are working on silicon, cadmium telluride, and CIGS cells now.
Amorphous silicon was another highly touted low-cost solution. Unlike Cadmium Sulfide, it did make it to market, and has a reasonable share of the market for low-cost, low-powered solar applications like the solar cells on calculators or inexpensive solar battery charges. Unfortunately, amorphous silicon loses efficiency when it is used outdoors. That efficiency loss can be substantial—in some cases up to 50% though that is apparently rare. Also, while initial lab efficiencies are high enough to make use on rooftops acceptable, getting to those efficiencies in a production environment has been very difficult. Apparently many of those problems have been ironed out in recent years and several companies are building very large amorphous solar cell manufacturing facilities.
Other promising technologies have been passed from company to company, always close to production and a price breakthrough, but never quite making it. For example, in 1992 Popular Science reported on an apparent breakthrough by Texas Instruments called Spherical Solar panels.
"The long-held dream of making inexpensive electricity from the sun should become real in 1992. Southern California Edison, the utility that serves most of Southern California, has teamed up with Texas Instruments to make a revolutionary type of solar panel on a trial basis. If tests show the panels can be made cheaply enough to compete with conventional generators, a commercial factory will be built in 1994." <snip>
"By using common materials and inexpensive manufacturing methods, the new solar panels are expected to cost as little as a fifth of those now on the market. The technological breakthrough came when Texas Instruments developed an innovative way to make photovoltaic cells from a widely available but impure form of silicon that costs only $1 per pound, rather than the $35 per pound crystalline silicon normally required."
Sounds great. It didn't go into mass production in 1994, though. As a matter of fact I don't think it ever went into substantial production. Texas Instruments sold the technology to another company, which sold it to another one. There was a flurry of excitement in 2002 or 2003, when it looked like the technology was finally going to go into production. Last I heard, a company called Photowatt was licensing the technology to a couple of Japanese firms. That was last year.
Many of the current hot ideas in solar, like Cadmium Telluride and CIS thin-film cells have been working in lab settings for decades. The problem is getting them to the point where they can be mass produced. That's still a problem for a lot of the thin film solar cell companies.
Second, oil companies invested in several of the US solar companies, and those companies generally didn't do too well. You can debate whether that was a matter of anti-competitive behavior, or a matter of bad management on the part of the oil companies, but the reality is that alternate energy companies they bought up tended to lose market share and innovate more slowly than others in the field. Early US solar cell leader Solarex was bought out by Amoco, traded around, and I believe it ended up as BP Solar. It's still around and still a mid-sized player, but is now struggling to remain in the top tier of solar cell companies.
In spite of that mediocre track record, oil companies were a welcome source of money for solar R&D and production expansion in the early to mid 1980s. When oil prices fell to their low in the mid-1980s, most of the big US oil companies pulled out of the market, leaving the industry much poorer, though probably more agile and efficient
Finally, it became kind of the conventional wisdom among business folk that the Middle East oil producers could produce oil profitably at well under $10 per barrel, and probably under $5. That meant that unless your technology was capable of going head-to-head with those kinds of prices it didn't make sense to invest in alternate energy on a large enought scale to threaten oil producers. Mideast oil producers could and would bankrupt you if they saw you as a threat. One of the reasons for the slow reactions to our current oil price run-up is that people remembered investing a lot of money and time to deal with the one in the early 80's only to see energy prices go down and stay down for over a decade. Solar cell companies stayed in business by finding profitable niches. Some of them were kind of bizarre. For example: At one point in the Reagan administration, one of the major solar cell manufacturers discovered that some huge percentage of their sales were coming from one rural county out west. From old and possibly faulty memory I think it might have been as much as eighty percent of their sales. They decided to figure out what was going on there so they could replicate the success elsewhere. They did a little digging and discovered that a few years before this county had cracked down on hydroponics operation growing certain shall we say 'medicinal' plants. Authorities would figure out where the hydroponics operations were by looking at electric bills, and then they would get a search warrant based on oversized electric bills. Some grower in this area figured out that all you had to do to get around that was to buy enough solar panels to drop electricity costs back into the normal range. Law enforcement might know what was going on, but they couldn't get a search warrant based on someone having solar panels. During the Clinton years a lot of solar panels got sold to survivalists worried about the collapse of civilization because of Y2K. A lot of those panels went onto the used market in the years after Y2K didn't happen, competing against new panels and depressing prices and production in the last year of the Clinton administration and the early Bush Jr administration..
Now here is a challenge: Let's assume no huge political shifts. Reagan beats Carter and Mondale. Bush is elected in 1988. The Soviet Union folds on schedule. Given that situation, how could you end up with solar cells taking off in a big way and ending up with the kind of market share that people were talking about back in 1980? I think solar heating was probably a lost cause, at least during this time period, so for this challenge let's just concentrate on solar cells and getting them to maybe 5 percent of US energy production by year 2000. That gives us eight years of the Clinton administration, along with the 12 Reagan/Bush 1 years.
Posted on Feb 3, 2012.
More Stuff For POD Members Only What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.
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