Solar power shines brighter

John W. Schoen Senior producer • Profile • E-mail

At 7,100 feet up in the Rocky Mountains, where the temperatures can hit 40 below, Amory Lovins has built a home that shows just how powerful solar energy can be. He says the house is 99 percent passive-solar heated, saves 99 percent of its water-heating energy, and consumes about $5 a month worth of electricity. The house is so toasty, Lovins says, he grows bananas indoors; he’s harvested 28 crops over the years.

“The extra cost of all those efficiencies paid for itself in ten months, 20 years ago,” he said. “But you can do better now.”

Lovins is no ordinary homeowner. As CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank and consulting group, he’s been working on ways to improve energy efficiency for more than 20 years. About two-thirds of the organization’s revenues come from advising major corporations.

Sunshine, in its broadest terms, is the ultimate source of most every form of energy used by man (with the exception of nuclear power). Fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas are the organic byproduct of plants and animals that derived their energy millions of year ago from the sun. Wind and hydro power rely on the motion of air and water created by the sun’s impact on the earth’s climate.

Direct solar energy is also useful in various forms: passive-solar building techniques can dramatically reduce energy consumption by cutting heating costs in winter and cooling costs in summer. Solar hot water installations can reduce or replace other forms of energy used to heat a building or make hot water.

But only relatively recently has the conversion of solar energy to electricity allowed it to be put to a variety of other uses, including powering vehicles, that could replace large quantities of oil.

The physics of turning sunlight into electricity has been known for over 100 years. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that researchers developed the first commercially viable solar cells -- a type of semiconductor that converts light into electricity. During the 1960s, the space program drove further advances in boosting the capacity and reducing the cost of making solar panels. More recently, thanks to advances in semiconductor manufacturing, the cost of producing solar cells continues to fall.

Despite its appeal –- free, plentiful, pollution-free electricity wherever and whenever the sun is shining -–the promise of solar energy remains largely unfulfilled.

The appeal of solar energy –- especially as a source of free, plentiful, pollution-free electricity wherever and whenever the sun is shining -– is hard to beat. But the promise of solar energy as a major power source remains largely unfulfilled. Though it is increasingly finding its way into “off-grid” applications in remote locations, high costs have prevented it from replacing utility-generated electricity in most parts of the world. And despite ongoing technological breakthroughs, it will likely be decades before solar satisfies a significant share of the world’s energy demand.

“The bottom line is we need pretty substantial technical breakthroughs in solar to move it from a technology that’s growing rapidly -- but is probably going to be a pretty niche technology -- to a technology that can really contribute substantial fractions of our energy supply,” said Ryan Wiser, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who specializes in the economics of renewable energy.

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