Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gives us Life by Richard Cohen

Author:Richard Cohen [Cohen, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780857209801
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2011-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

Augustine Mouchot’s solar-powered printing press at the

Paris World Exhibition of 1878

A few years later, in 1900, an enterprising Bostonian, Aubrey Eneas, formed the first solar power company, and began building sun-powered machines to irrigate the Arizona desert. In 1903 he moved to Los Angeles, closer to his most promising customer base, and the following year sold his first complete system for $2,160. After less than a week, a windstorm tumbled the boiler rigging into the reflector. Accustomed to setbacks, Eneas constructed another pump. In the autumn of 1904 a rancher in Wilcox, Arizona, bought the improved model, but it too was destroyed, this time by a hailstorm. It became clear that the massive parabolic reflector was too vulnerable, and the company folded. Other entrepreneurs were to follow (notably Henry E. Willsie, operating out of St Louis and Needles, California, who created a system that allowed his machines to function at night, using the heat gathered during the day), but their companies also failed to turn a profit.

Despite this dismal history, proponents continued to believe that if they could find the right combination of technologies, they could produce unlimited energy. One who shared that dream was a Brooklyn-born engineer, Frank Shuman (1862–1918), whose first solar motor, built in 1897, performed poorly, because even at respectable pressures the steam exerted insufficient force. Rather than trying to generate more heat, he replaced the boiler pipes with a flat metal container similar to Tellier’s original design and devised a low-cost reflector: two rows of mirrors strung together to double the amount of sunshine intercepted. He then constructed the largest conversion system ever built, capable of delivering 55 horsepower and driving a water pump that gushed 3,000 gallons per minute – at a cost of $150 per horsepower, compared with the $80 of a conventionally operated coal system: a respectable outlay, he reckoned, considering that the investment would be quickly recouped because the fuel was free. Another reason he was not concerned about the fact that the energy delivered by his machine cost more than that from coal- or oil-fired engines was that, like the early French entrepreneurs, he planned to ship his invention to vast sunburned North Africa.

In 1912 he started work on the world’s first solar power station – fittingly in Egypt, once the centre of sun worship. The site was Meadi, then 15 miles south of Cairo, and boasted 7 curved reflecting troughs, each 205 feet in length, with the thousand-horsepower steam engine producing over 55 horsepower. But the beginning was also the end. Two months after the final trials, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, igniting the Great War. The engineers operating Shuman’s plant returned to their respective countries to perform war-related tasks, and before the armistice was signed Shuman was dead. After the war, with the fall in the price of oil, interest in solar experiments once again evaporated.

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