Solar Cells vs. The Atomic Gadget for Your Desk

Many people know that the solar cell was invented at Bell Labs, helped along by the men who created the silicon semiconductors that underpin electronics. But a far less well-known story today is the nearly simultaneous creation of what were known as “atomic batteries” by Bell Labs’ arch-rival, RCA, in 1954. As described in John Perlin’s From Space to Earth, the battery was made from silicon like a solar cell but, “it used photons emitted from strontium-90, one of hte deadliest residues of radioactive waste, to force the flow of electrons and positive charges” that drove the electricity.

RCA’s founder and president, David Sarnoff showed off the battery at a press event at Radio City, tapping out “Atoms for Peace” on an old-school telegraph powered by the battery in a darkened room. The press ate up the presentation, with The New York Times saying, “even now it ought to be possible to make a tiny wrist watch which would be driven by electrons and which would run for twenty years.” Waldemar Kaempffert, the reporter on the scene, even hinted that radioactive waste “will have important industrial uses, now that a way has been found to generate a current with strontium-90.”

If it was safe (ahem), this member of the press agrees: Atomic gadgets are cool — and this one had found a way to transform radioactive decay directly into electric current using a silicon cell. Why not power your watch with nuclear waste?

Well, it turns out that atomic batteries are weak sauce. The RCA “atomic cell” only delivered one-millionth of a watt. Bell’s Solar Battery — the earliest remotely efficient solar cell — presented in April of 1954, “delivered fifty million times more more power than the RCA device,” Electrical World noted.

Perlin also reveals that the silicon cell powered by strontium-90 would have worked just as well, if not better, if it had just been exposed to light. The strontium-90 was hardly doing much at all, but it was useful for the Cold War aim of the United States: promoting the peaceful uses of nuclear energy — Atoms for Peace, as seen in the video — so we could build weapons without seeming like overbearing goons. The strontium-powered cell allowed the naturally futuristic minds of the public to imagine that radioactive waste would eventually be put to good use, not just end up a big mess. The director of RCA Laboratories grasped that, telling his scientists, “Who cares about solar energy? Look, what we really have is this radioactive waste converter.”

Still, five years later, we find Time writing up the SNAP III, a later “atomic gadget”:

On President Eisenhower’s desk stood a domed metal gadget about half the size of a derby hat. Current flowing from it spun a small propeller. Named SNAP III (for System for Nuclear Auxiliary Power), the little gadget is an atomic battery small and light enough to go into a satellite and keep its instruments and radio voice going at least ten times as long as any chemical battery that the Russians or the U.S. have yet employed.

The Snap III produced a measly 2.7 watts. Of course, the batteries were terrible, so they made the cell look decent. A better comparison would have been solar cells. Both batteries and solar cells were put into the Vanguard I satellite. The batteries lasted 19 days, the solar cells made it seven years. That’s 134 better performance, and a hell of a lot better than the 10x improvement offered by the SNAP III.  Yet there’s no mention of solar cells in the Time article.

Not that the lack of press hurt photovoltatic development for space applications. Solar cells ultimately proved far more economical for satellites and continue to power modern day communications satellites.

 

The Middle Ages of the Electric Utility Industry

The utility industry has been in decline for half a century, according to a mid-80s book by a Merril Lynch analyst, Leonard S. Hyman.

In America’s Electric Utilities: Past, Present, and Future (which, now would be distant past, past, and recent past, of course) Leonard S. Hyman lays out a narrative for America’s electric utilities that goes roughly like this:

1900 or so: Edison and Westinghouse put the industry together, but there’s substantial competition on all fronts, including the customers themselves, who might very well choose to make their own power.

1907: The utilities get regulated, supposedly because they were a “natural monopoly.” Utilities, in effect, get the government to guarantee that their investors will get a “fair rate of return,” which no one defines. The interesting thing about Hyman’s argument here is that he thinks the utilities allowed/pushed for regulation largely as a way of reducing risk so that they could borrow money more cheaply. It’s yet another way in which financing the kinds of huge project that is an energy plant has affected the structure of the industry.

1915: Things settle down. The electric utility model we know is firmly established. Now, it’s just a matter of making more demand, so that plants can get bigger and run more efficiently.

1915-1935: Holding companies grow as a form of leverage and an easy asset with which to swindle sucker investors. Actually, the form of these companies look a lot like our real estate investment vehicles.

1935-1945: Roosevelt Administration smashes through the holding companies, requiring that they actually have a reason to exist aside from skimming money off the public good. It takes a while to break up all those companies. And there’s a lot of other stuff going on.

1945-1965: These were “the good old days,” Hyman says. “The industry increased the size of power plants, and those new plants utilized fuel more efficiently.” Coal prices went up but were swamped by efficiency increases. Demand rises steadily, something like 7-8% each and every year. All you do to plan is say, “Well, Bob, I say we build more.” Bob assents, each and every time.

1960-1973: The use of oil for electric generation skyrockets. Growing from just 6.1% of generation in 1960 to a peak of 16.9% of generation in 1973. Utilities were trying to get away from burning all that nasty sulfur-heavy coal. Meanwhile, conventional coal plants stop getting more efficient. Demand stops growing. Nuclear power sucks up all the money in the industry as huge plants hit major cost overruns. BUT, here’s the bright side: the use of coal falls to about 44% of the electric mix. And right in the middle of this period, power goes out for 30 million northeastern customers. Everyone says, “WTF? I thought you had this figured out.”

1973: Energy prices skyrocket, consumers pull back. The utilities are stuck with all this excess capacity and cost overruns and all that noise. It’s important to note here that the ‘73 embargo was just the match that lit the powder keg.

1974: Investors start to realize that perhaps utilities are a little riskier than they thought. Too big to fail, but certainly small enough to lose money. That heavily influences how much money they have to pay to borrow more money.

1979-1983: Three Mile Island. Oops. Even if it didn’t kill a whole bunch of people, it sure scared everyone. Another strike against nuclear power. The bigger one, though, was the costs. Here’s an amazing quote, written like a truly outraged analyst, “On October 5, 1983, Cincinatti G&E shocked investors by announcing that the Zimmer nuclear station, supposedly 97% complete, would required $2.8-3.3 billion in additional investment and two to three years of work to be finished. That news was the first of many disastrous nuclear crises that followed.” $6 billion in construction was “written off to oblivion” and stock prices plunged 60-80%.

What went wrong? Here’s Hyman’s short list:

The nuclear crises of 1983-1984 pushed a number of utilities close to bankruptcy. Demand for power was unpredictable. Development of nuclear power had been arrested. Many utilities had excessive capacity. The concept of central station power was under attack. New methods of regulation [he means environmental regs] seemed to put a premium on discouraging demand for central station power… Many utility executives and government officials concluded that electric utilities must turn to smaller power stations (some owned by non-utilities) and must exchange power from surplus to deficit regions as much as possible… Utilities could no longer run as monopolies.

Who won in all this? There’s really no one to cheer for but the anti-hero: Coal.

And now, things look just as grim as they did back in the 70s and early 80s. All those coal plants that provide baseload power for the U.S.? Well, they’re getting old. The Edison Electric Institute says the industry will have to spend between $1.5 and $2.0 TRILLION over the next 22 years just to keep the lights on. Who is going to pay for all that? Probably not the utilities themselves. Take a look at Xcel: they had net income of about $500 million. That’s not much. And Xcel is one of the big utilities.

On the other hand, as they like to say in Silicon Valley, it’s the big problems that present the big opportunities.

 

An Introduction to the Largest Interconnected Machine on Earth

The Department of Energy released a new, by-way-of-introduction report on The Grid, which as you can read below, can “appropriately” be called “an ecosystem.”

Our century-old power grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth, so massively complex and inextricably linked to human involvement and endeavor that it has alternately (and appropriately) been called an ecosystem. It consists of more than 9,200 electric generating units with more than 1,000,000 megawatts of generating capacity connected to more than 300,000 miles of transmission lines.

Via > Greenbiz

Image: flickr/sjalex

 

Required Reading: “A Golden Thread” and “Wind Energy in America”

Happily, in just the last 72 hours, I’ve received two key books for my research: Ken Butti and John Perlin’s A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology and Robert Righter’s Wind Energy in America: A History. These texts, along with the Canadian Center for Archictecture’s Out of Gas exhibit book, are absolute must-reads about the history of alternative energy.

I’m the farthest in Righter’s book and I’m immensely pleased with how well-researched and fanatically sourced it is. He’s particularly good at combing through the agricultural journals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to ferret out the story of the small wind-electric plants installed on farms across the country. He argues that most farmers got their first exposure to the pleasures of electricity through these small units produced by Jacobs and Wincharger and Aero-Electric. The section on Marcellus Jacobs and his turbines is one of the finest pieces of alt energy history that I’ve read.

He traces this reliable, excellent wind power generator through its various ups-and-downs, including a unit’s travel to Little America in Antarctica with Byrd, the explorer. (That’s the image). That picture was borrowed from the still-operating Jacobs Wind Electric Co.

Perlin and Butti’s book, first published in 1980, is fascinating not just for the history it covers but as a piece of history itself. On the back we find sparkling reviews from a host of high-level publications.

The New York Times calls it, “A clear and evocative account of the 2,500-year history of a technology–solar energy–that many people thought was a purely 20th century development.” The Washington Post provides an even better review calling it a “careful, thoughtful”  book that touches on “an awesome range of solar uses and issues.”

And now this seminal book is basically out-of-print and hard-to-find as hundreds (thousands?) of lesser “green” books flood the shelves. It’s a shame.

 

11th Hour Deja Vu

Sometimes, like say when you’re watching the Leonardo DiCaprio/worldsaving vehicle 11th Hour, you might get the feeling that no one really saw global energy problems and ecological disasters coming. Like everyone in the 1940s was just wearing a fedora, talking like Humphrey Bogart, and happily eating coal for breakfast.

But it didn’t happen like that. There were plenty of thinkers with visions of the apocalypse dancing in their heads. Even ideas like ecosystem services — the ecowonk’s favorite — were anticipated and articulated. Fairfield Osborn called those services the “natural life-giving elements of the earth” in this passage from Our Plundered Planet (1948):

The tide of the earth’s population is rising, the reservoir of the earth’s living resources is falling. Technologists may outdo themselves in the creation of artificial substances for natural subsistence, and new areas, such as those in tropical or subtropical regions, may be adapted to human use, but even such recourses or developments cannot be expected to offset the present terrific attack upon the natural life-giving elements of the earth. There is only one solution: Man must recognize the necessity of cooperating with nature. He must temper his demands and use and conserve the natural living resources of this earth in a manner that alone can provide for the continuation of his civilization. The final answer is to be found only through comprehension of the enduring processes of nature. The time for defiance is at an end.

Via > Adam Rome’s The Bulldozer in the Countryside

Image: Fuel advertisement via the LOC’s Advertising Ephemera collection.

 

The Amnesiac Civilization and Energy

I picked up Vaclav Smil’s Energy at the Crossroads yesterday at Moe’s in Berkeley. A historian of technology at the University of Calgary, he points out that our large-scale “prime movers” were created before 1920. Turbines and internal combustion engines do almost all human work — and that gives them incredible social and technical inertia. Here’s a taste of his outlook from a presentation (pdf) he gave a couple years ago:

Appraisals of long-term prospects of technical and economic developments have become increasingly devoid of appropriate historical perspectives. But this blindness of progressively more amnesic civilization will not force a different outcome: future technical developments will not conform to simplistic notions of accelerated development and exponentially declining costs of new conversions. Recent costs of many renewable techniques have been actually increasing (Makower, Pernick and Wilder 2006). PV silicon prices have more than doubled, cost of structural steel, aluminum and plastics for wind turbines has been rising as has been the cost ethanol fermentation from corn because all of these techniques depend on large inputs of more costly fossil energies.

Image: The Georgetown Steam Plant, completed in 1917. Library of Congress: Built in America collection. “The Georgetown Steam Plant is an early reinforced concrete structure housing America’s last operable examples of the ‘first generation’ of large scale, vertical steam turbine electric generators. The structure contains sixteen, 500 horsepower stirling boilers which supply steam to two vertical turbines. The smaller 1906 unit generates 3000 kilowatts and a larger 1907 unit generates 8000 kilowatts. In 1917 Seattle Electric installed a 10000 kilowatt horizontal turbine generator unit manufactured by the General Electric Company. The Georgetown Steam Plant was used primarily as a standby and peaking facility. It provided alternating current for general use and direct current for the Seattle streetcar system. It is the last operative example of vertical curtis turbines in the United States.”

 

Wind Power Fiction from the 1911 New York Times

The April 30, 1911 edition of The New York Times featured a wonderful piece on the creation of J.G. Childs’ “wind turbine electrical plant,” which tells a delightful fairy tale about what wind power would do for the rural farm:

“Here are some of its possibilities on a farm,” we read:

It pumps all the water used upon the place and feeds an artificial stream and lake. The owner is relied of that chief dread that besets the country resident. He goes to bed with the comfortable assurance that should fire break out his hydrants will furnish ample streams of water driven by electrical force.

All the buildings are lighted by electricity, the plant running 100 or more 16-candle-power lamps if necessary. All parts of the house are connected by telephone, and communication with the stables, the boathouse, or the garage is readily secured through the same medium.

In the winter the residence and outbuildings are heated by electricity, and in the summer cooled by electric fans. One needs to have had experience of an electric cooking range to appreciate all the benefits. It is the simplest and least troublesome arrangement imaginable. All that is necessary is to move a switch and the current does the rest. The food is not only cooked more precisely but also more quickly than by any other process…

It is possible also to arrange so the carpets are cleaned by the vacuum process and the furniture dusted by suction. The housekeeper uses power from the same source to run her sewing machine and in the nursery it is employed to operate the youngsters’ mechanical toys…

The owner of the place uses an electric motor car because it is free from noise, dirt, and odor but more than everything else, he gets an unlimited quantity of electricity free and without trouble. His machine is always ready for immediate use and no appreciable time or trouble is expended in keeping it in that condition. When it comes in from a trip it is run into the garage, and recharged by the wind-plant, either directly from the generator or from the storage battery.

Life in the country will be made immeasurably more attractive by the wind turbine.

Where did this vision come from? It’s unsourced, as if the writer’s imagination saw a future utopia and reported on it. Unfortunately, nothing like this has really ever come to pass, although I dare say it seems a lot like the corporate plan for the Boulder Smart Grid City.  Only 97 years late.

Image: An electric car (left) next to a gasoline powered car (right) in Denver. Sometime between 1910 and 1920. Caption at the Library of Congress: An unidentified woman rides in an electric automobile, Julia Rhoads and Hazel Ladora Gates ride in a gas powered automobile, Denver, Colorado. The women wear fur stoles over their outfits and elaborate hats.

 

The DOE’s Solar Photovoltaic Budget 1975-2002

I recently read Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute spouting nonsense about how much funding the Department of Energy has wasted on renewable energy.

“[Mr. Chu] is an indication that Obama really is committed to pursing renewable energy, which the Energy Department has been subsidizing and researching for 30 years,” Ebell told the Washington Times. “It’s a boondoggle.”

Well, for the best-known alt energy technology, solar photovoltaics, here’s what that “boondoggle” has cost the taxpayer: less than $75 million a year since the early 80s. That’s nothing!

I’d be willing to be that our government probably spent more than that on beer for the military.

Via > National Renewable Energy Laboratory

 

Electrical Generation as a Part-Time Job for Kids

Forget raising pigs, wind turbines are where the money is at.

At least that could have been true in 1933, according to this article from Popular Mechanix. In it L.G. Heimpel, an agricultural professor at MacDonald College in Quebec, argues that your average farm boy could making a little extra cash by charging people’s batteries with a Model T’s old generator and some wind power:

Any thousands of farm folk are still dependent upon battery sets for their radio programs. To them the charging of storage batteries is still the greatest bugbear of the battery set. This homemade wind-driven charger is an economical solution of their problem; indeed, it is designed to take care of not only the battery of a single set but the batteries of a whole neighborhood. The farm boy who makes one of these in a community not served by high-line power can earn the cost of the plant and extra spending money in a short time.

Amazingly, the article holds the possibility of creating user-generated content. Any reader could write in to get the full plans for the propeller-style turbine.

“A long bulletin with detailed instructions for making the propeller and assembling, wiring, and operating the plant will be sent free to any reader who incloses [sic] a large self-addressed and stamped envelope,” we read.

Via > Modern Mechanix

 

Coal: Solidified Sunbeams (Planted for Humanity)

Here we have one of the most poetic descriptions of coal that you’re likely to see. It’s from a National Geographic article written in the throes of World War I and titled, “Coal—Ally of American Industry.” The picture is captioned: Beneath These Bare Rocks Lie the Solidified Sunbeams Stored by Provident Nature for Resourceful Man. Solidified Sunbeams!  In the hands of this able chronicler and evangelist of/for coal, he — like the science he loves — transforms coal into much more:

Under [Man's] touch coal becomes comfort in the home or death at the battle front; yields a corrosive acid that burns lie fire or a sweetness that makes sugar seem insipid; gives off a gas that smells like a bad egg, but is as harmless as chicken; is transformed into colors that make the rainbow envious of their brightness and variety, and into explosives the thunderbolt jealous of their power.

Dang! No wonder we use so much of it. How many other substances do you know that can make both rainbows and thunderbolts jealous? Tell you what, potassium chloride isn’t gonna do that for you.

And indeed William Joseph Showalter puts his finger right on the problem with fossil fuels: they are just too damn useful. They are energy dense — so you can do a lot of work with them – and relatively abundant — so you don’t have to pay a lot for them. Put it together and you have enormous productive power at relatively low cost.

The problem is that we have run out before. First it’s happened locally, like Pennsylvania basically running out of coal. Then it’s happened nationally, like American oil peaking in 1970. Globally, we’ve never really run out of the major fossil fuels — oil, natural gas, and coal — but it’s looking increasingly likely that we will and not in a long, long time, but soon.

Clearly, my reading — and reporting from the world’s biggest geology conference — have me thinking about the previous energy busts in history. David Rutledge, a Caltech professor ranging outside his field, came up with a new way to calculate the world’s reserves of a given resource. The shocking conclusion of his research is that we might actually pull — and burn — a lot less coal out of the ground than we previously thought. That has all kinds of implications for global warming, climate change policy, the future of the planet, the necessity of creating alternative technologies, etc. You can check out my story for Wired Science, if you want to here more about that stuff.

More importantly for my book is that he developed his method based on the history of previous energy production. He went back and looked at previous cases of resource exhaustion – whale oil, British coal, American oil (which peaked in 1970, if you hadn’t heard) — and fit curves to the data, looking for the “ultimate” amount that would ever be produced of the given resource. It turns out that using this model, which admittedly is pretty speculative, you could have predicted these previous peaks just based on how much coal or whale oil was coming out of the ground or oceans. He’s got a great set of slides that detail his methodology and provide a brief tutorial of the great busts of energy history (ppt).

It just so happened that I also began reading Petrolia, by Brian Black, which details the very first oil boom (and bust). From 1859 to 1873, the Allegheny mountains of Pennsylvania were the number 1 oil producing region in the world. Mostly because they had the petroleum market to themselves there at the beginning. What they were actually competing against was whale oil, increasingly scarce as whalers were forced to search more and more ocean to kill and eviscerate the same amount of whale, and various animal lards (I know: gross). By 1850, there was an $8 million whale oil market and a bustling trade in the stuff. Whalers would go out for three to five years to bring back a few thousand gallons of burnable oil.

In this early section of the book, Black presents some excellent evidence that earlier oil distribution systems and some lamp design innovations allowed for the rapid introduction of petroleum into the American economy. Because all these companies were playing in the same space: the light market. Something to burn to get out of the dark.  Illumination!

“Creating affordable lighting possessed the divine potential of increasing time in the day,” we read.

There is something godly about transforming geological history into human time, to taking these “solidifed sunbeams” that were “planted for humanity by a bounteous Providence in the Carboniferous Age” and turning them into the extension of human time, a few more hours allotted to each of millions of individuals.

The scale and size of the industry that arose seems totally out of step with the simple convenience that light provided.

To see them gathered at a rate of more than two million tons a day, transported hundreds of miles, and then, under the alchemy of science, transmuted into a thousand forms—heat for the fireside, light for the darkness, motion for the railroad train, power for the factory, fertility for the soil—is an illuminating lesson, showing how man, the creature of Nature, through science makes her wonderful forces his servants.

And then you run out. The year before Showalter wrote — though he probably didn’t know this — Pennsylvania anthracite coal hit its peak and has been declining ever since.

Images: National Geographic.