On the Sunny Side of the Energy Street : New solar technology to get a run for the money

Once again, California is on the cutting edge of a technology that could change the way the world lives.

Except for nuclear power plants, everything that generates electricity uses sunlight that nature has stored in some fashion. Even windmills are beholden to the sun for the movement of air from cooler to warmer areas.

With nuclear plants on the financial ropes for now, the search for better generating technology is swinging toward ways to use the sun directly and eliminate such middlemen as oil, gas and wood.

As it has so often in the past, California is pushing on the frontiers of the search. Nearly four months ago, Southern California Edison Co. announced it had discovered new techniques for making photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight directly to electricity.

COST REDUCTION: If two years of experiments now in progress indicate that results produced in the laboratory can be transferred to the factory, the process could cut the existing costs of photovoltaic systems by 80%. Now Edison and two other California utilities are planning to build the most advanced solar power plant in the world in the Mojave Desert near Barstow. It will be built next door to an earlier experimental plant that has sold power to Southern California Edison since 1982.

What Edison, the Los Angeles City Department of Water and Power and the Sacramento Municipal Utility hope will be different about the new plant is that it will be able to produce power at a profit.

The older plant, Solar One, built and operated by Luz International Ltd., never could produce power for less than the price it could get for it. The three utilities hope that a new wrinkle in technology will allow Solar Two to turn a profit by the end of the century.

URGENT NEED: The plant will cost $39 million--about half of which will come from the U.S. Department of Energy, which pioneered the new solar technology in much smaller pilot plants in New Mexico. It will produce 10 megawatts of power, slightly less than 10% of the output of the most common power plants now on line.

It will work much like the old plant, with huge mirrors focusing the sun’s rays to produce heat. But instead of heating oil, as the older Luz plant does, Solar Two’s mirrors will heat molten salt. Planners think salt will store heat and release it to produce steam for generating turbines more efficiently than any substance now in use in solar generating experiments.

Even the more advanced Solar Two may produce power that costs more than conventional generating plants, but the incentives to find ways to use the sun are more than economic.

Edison and DWP are committed to reducing their emissions of carbon dioxide 20% over the next 20 years. What is driving decisions like that is concern that carbon dioxide may be weaving a blanket around the Earth that will trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere and gradually raise temperatures to what could be unbearable levels in some countries--also known as the greenhouse effect.

It all comes under the rubric “looking ahead,” something the world never quite does enough.