Solar History
As early as 1838 that Edmund Becquerel observed and published findings about the nature of certain materials to turn light into energy. Thirty years later between 1860 and 1881, Auguste Mouchout, a mathematics instructor at the Lyce de Tours, became the first man to patent a design for a motor running on solar energy. This invention was born out of his concern with his country’s dependency on coal. “It would be prudent and wise not to fall asleep regarding this quasi-security.” Mouchout received funds from the French Emperor Napoleon III and with those funds he designed a device that turned solar energy into mechanical steam power and soon operated the first steam engine. He later connected the steam engine to a refrigeration device. Unfortunately, the cost of coal returned to normal and funding for his projects was doomed.
In the United States, Swedish-born John Ericsson led efforts to harness solar power. He designed the “parabolic trough collector,” a technology which functions more than a hundred years later on the same basic design. Ericsson is best known for having conceived the USS Monitor, the armored ship integral to the U.S. Civil War. Solar power could boast few major gains through the first half of the 20th century, though interest in a solar-powered civilization never completely disappeared. In fact, Albert Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics for his research on the photoelectric effect—a phenomenon central to the generation of electricity through solar cells.
In 1953, Bell Laboratories (now AT&T labs) scientists Gerald Pearson, Daryl Chapin and Calvin Fuller developed the first silicon solar cell capable of generating a measurable electric current. The New York Times reported the discovery as “the beginning of a new era, leading eventually to the realization of harnessing the almost limitless energy of the sun for the uses of civilization.”
In 1956, solar photovoltaic (PV) cells were far from economically practical. Electricity from solar cells ran about $300 per watt. (For comparison, current market rates for a watt of solar PV hover around $5.) The “Space Race” of the 1950s and 60s gave modest opportunity for progress in solar, as satellites and crafts used solar paneling for electricity.
It was not until October 17, 1973 that solar leapt to prominence in energy research. The Arab Oil Embargo demonstrated the degree to which the Western economy depended upon a cheap and reliable flow of oil. As oil prices nearly doubled over night, leaders became desperate to find a means of reducing this dependence. In addition to increasing automobile fuel economy standards and diversifying energy sources, the U.S. government invested heavily in the solar electric cell that Bell Laboratories had produced with such promise in 1953.
The hope in the 1970s was through massive investment in subsidies and researches, solar photovoltaic costs could drop precipitously and eventually become competitive with fossil fuels. By the 1990s, the reality was that costs of solar energy had dropped as predicted, but costs of fossil fuels had also dropped—solar was competing with a falling baseline. However, huge PV market growth in Japan and Germany from the 1990s to the present has reenergized the solar industry.
In 2002 Japan installed 25,000 solar rooftops. Such large PV orders are creating economies of scale, thus steadily lowering costs. The PV market is currently growing at a blistering 30 percent per year, with the promise of continually decreasing costs. Meanwhile, solar thermal water heating is an increasingly cost-effective means of lowering gas and electricity demand.
