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If the whole world consumed 500 quadrillion BTU’s of energy in 2000, and that’s only a bit generous, than a square of photovoltaic cells 200 miles on a side would have produced 100% of the world’s energy requirements in that year. That’s assuming 8 watts of output per square foot of PVs, 6 hours of sun a day year-round, and 70% efficiency after transmission and conversion.

When I visited BP Solar’s photovoltaic manufacturing plant in Fairfield, California, I hadn’t done the math in time to ask Mac Moore, Director of Building and Utility Markets for North America, how much it would cost to buy a square of PV’s 200 miles on a side, capable of producing annually 16,700 gigawatt years (500 quadrillion BTU’s) of electric power. But if it were up to BP Solar, photovoltaics would be well on their way to producing a substantial share of the world’s energy.

Mac Moore at BP Solar

Currently the total world manufacturing capacity for photovoltaics, according to Moore, is about 400 megawatts. Of that BP produces 60 megawatts, or 15% of the world output. When the Fairfield plant goes into full production early next year, another 10 megawatts per year will be added to BP’s share. Despite dramatic lowering of costs to produce photovoltaics in the last decade, and skyrocketing overall energy cost, photovoltaics remain a minor player in global energy supply.

Photovoltaic cells take their place alongside wind and geothermal energy as “non-hydro renewables.” It is the goal of Sir John Browne, the Chairman of British Petroleum, for “renewables to contribute 5% of the world’s energy supply by 2020.” That seems like a modest goal, until one considers the staggering increases in manufacturing of PVs and wind systems that will be required to achieve it. At the current rate of world PV production, it would take 175 years before photovoltaics supplied just one percent of the world’s energy requirements.

Moore did get a chance to answer some questions about prices for more modest systems, because while PVs are not likely to totally replace conventional fuels anytime soon, they are now cost competitive with conventional electrical energy during periods of peak demand. At $10 per watt installed (assuming a 25 year life), PV generated electricity costs $.35 per kilowatt hour, which is under peak costs which frequently exceed $.40 per kilowatt hour and have gone much higher. This means that a relatively small percentage of electrical power from PV arrays can exert a powerful downward pressure on peak prices by contributing power to the grid when demand is highest.

According to BP’s Moore, the lowest installed cost right now of PVs for large scale commercial orders is about $6 per watt, which is $.21 per kilowatt hour. Recent California baseline prices have now gone up to $.15 per kilowatt hour, putting PV costs within striking distance of conventional electrical costs. Ironically, the viability of PVs has increased their price to the end-users, because current demand to purchase PVs is far beyond supply, and there is no end in sight.

BP Photovoltaic Plant

Over the next decade, it appears that PVs and renewables may have to compete with one more surge of fossil fuel power electrical generating capacity, at least in the U.S. That makes rapid expansion of PV manufacturing capacity a risky business. If natural gas production and distribution capacity is dramatically increased in North America, and it probably will be, the price of electricity could drop back down to under $.10 per kilowatt hour, or even lower. If conventional sources of electricity come down in price for a sustained period, BP and other major solar players could end up being able to make more PVs than they could sell at a profit.

Not only supply and demand affects the drive toward increased PV production, however. Greenhouse gas emissions are increasingly recognized as threats to change the global climate, with the potential to wreak catastrophic changes in sea level and global ecosystems. In 1996, BP’s Chairman Sir John Browne broke with the other major oil companies in committing BP to comply with the Kyoto protocols, which are an attempt by the nations of the world to cooperate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To this end, BP is developing many types of renewable energy, not only PVs, but also wind power. BP is a member of the California Fuel Cell Partnership, a consortium that is deploying prototype cars that operate using fuel cells, which rely on chemical reactions instead of combustion for power, meaning they emit little or no carbon. BP has also begun to retrofit all of its filling stations to have canopies over the pumps that are covered with PVs. For that matter, at the Fairfield plant, a PV array along the southwest side of the building and built into the windows has been installed to provide much of the power requirements.

Photovoltaic Arrays

In the U.S., the challenge BP Solar faces is not just to bring the price down on their PVs, through thin film technology and other processes where they are the world’s leader. If BP Solar is to continue selling PVs as fast as they can make them, at the same time as they increase their manufacturing capacity to make a real impact on the world’s energy supply, they will have to produce compelling evidence of carbon emissions causing global warming, and present their case to the American people.

The United States trails the world in complying with the Kyoto protocals, and may scrap them entirely. BP can bring the price of PVs down to a fraction of what they cost today, and they still will not be able to compete, at least in the next few decades, with the short-term dollar cost of coal, nuclear, and natural gas energy solutions. To grow their business, as well as for the welfare of the planet, BP has to join the war for the hearts and minds of the American people.

Is global warming an inevitable result of carbon emissions? If so, what are the consequences? Answer that question with clear, undeniable facts, and convince the public that PVs, wind, fuel cells, and hydrogen power is the answer. That is BP Solar’s marketing challenge.

So how much would the giant square of PVs 200 miles on a side cost? An array large enough to power the world? At today’s price of $6 per watt, about 50 trillion dollars. What’s the planet worth?

Anuvu’s Magic Carpet

Mockup of Anuvu’s Car

Would you buy a car that goes 700 miles on a fill-up, and costs only $20 to fill the tank? There are many candidates for next-generation cars: high-tech diesels, hybrids, super-engineered gasoline powered cars, electric cars, and fuel cell cars that use reformers. But the most efficient we’ve seen yet is a prototype being developed by Anuvu Inc. (www.anuvu.com) in downtown Sacramento, California. In a lab in an old brick building that once housed a brewery, alongside the tracks just north of downtown, there is a car being developed that could have a prototype version running in six months, and be available to consumers in two years. This remarkable vehicle has been engineered with no compromises, and could very well represent the state-of-the-art in fuel efficient automotive engineering.

When I visited the CEO of Anuvu, Rex Hodges, and the VP of Sales, Lyn Cowgill, in early 2001, I had no idea just how far ahead of the pack they really were. After all, Anuvu is building a fuel cell powered car, and from what I’d seen in December 2000 when EcoWorld visited the California Fuel Cell Partnership where eight major automakers have assembled an automotive fleet of advanced fuel cell prototypes, it was clear that a lot of work still needed to be done before we’d see them on the road. But that was then.

As Hodges patiently explained the engineering highlights of Anuvu’s car, it slowly dawned on me that this unassuming man has built a car with the potential to become a virtually cost-free, pollution-free source of personal transportation. A magic carpet. A free ride. Hodges used to work at Aerojet, where, after getting a degree in Mechanical Engineering at U.C. Davis in 1988, he participated in the design of the National Aerospace Plane as well as programs related to the Strategic Defense Initiative. But SDI’s loss has been the green revolution’s gain. In 1994 Rex Hodges, Sarah Hodges, and Lyn Cowgill formed Anuvu to apply space-age technologies to commercialize alternative energy and transportation.

There are five principle reasons why the Anuvu car has the potential to set the standard for clean, cheap and trouble-free transportation in the next few years:

Oxygen + Hydrogen = Electricity

1) The fuel cell is fueled by hydrogen and oxygen from onboard tanks. Using hydrogen means that no reformer is required. Reformers that convert propane or natural gas or other fuels into hydrogen are heavy, and don’t do a very good job. Impurities in the converted hydrogen shorten the life of the fuel cell. Cells that use pure hydrogen last 10 years or more. Using oxygen means that compressed air is not required, and air compressors are heavy and consume about 25% of the fuel cell’s power before the car even gets moving.

Design Prototype

2) The car has efficient aerodynamics. Drag on a vehicle can dramatically impair fuel efficiency. The drag coefficient on the Anuvu car, which is shaped sort of like a teardrop, is .18, compared to .25 on the highly aerodynamic Honda Insight, and compared to about .35 on a typical modern car. This means that the Anuvu car requires roughly 50% less power to operate at freeway speeds compared to a car of similar weight with typical aerodynamics.

3) The car is lightweight. While there are lots of unfamiliar components on the Anuvu car, in sum they don’t weigh a lot, and the body is comprised of a lightweight impact absorbing proprietary material that allows for energy absorption regardless of the direction of impact. Including a crash cage to protect the passengers that is made out of a carbon epoxy structure 10-15 times stronger than steel by weight, the whole vehicle weighs only 2,200 pounds.

4) The powertrain consists of four electric motors (which function as generators when the car brakes) inside the hubs of the four wheels. Here again, innovative, no-compromise engineering is evident. Rather than using off-the-shelf iron-core electric motors, which lose efficiency because the metal core emits magnetic fields that impair the primary fields from the coils, Anuvu has designed their own motors. These motors use large-diameter coils that are inside the hubs, consequently the coils have a much greater surface area which yields greater torque. Having four motors means there is no drive train, no differential, and, of course, no transmission.

5) Here’s the best of all: The Anuvu car’s fuel cell puts out 25KW of power, which is sufficient for normal driving. But the Anuvu car has a secondary power system, a flywheel generator that stores RPM (up to 33,000) through surplus energy from the main fuel cell as well as from regenerative braking. When the car’s electric motors need more power, the flywheel generator kicks in with up to 50KW of additional power, making the Anuvu car capable of going from 0 to 60 MPH in 6.6 seconds, with a 300 pound occupant load. What Anuvu has done is apply the flywheel generator / fuel cell combo to improve the fuel efficiency of a fuel cell powered car in almost exactly the same way as the gasoline / electric hybrids have improved the efficiency of gasoline powered cars. This is pretty cool stuff, folks.

With all this rocket science (literally), questions about cost and reliability are inevitable. But the Anuvu drive-train has only four moving parts: The electric motors, which last forever if you replace the bearings maybe once every 10 years, the flywheel, which should last “several decades” according to Hodges, and a coolant pump and fan for the fuel cell. Compared to the parts in a typical gas-powered car, this vehicle is extremely simple.

It’s difficult to say what it’s really going to cost to make and sell the Anuvu car at a decent profit, but Hodges and his team project that their car should be available to the consumer for about $30,000. Not bad for a car that promises to require almost no maintenance, should last for decades, and can run 700 miles on $20 worth of electricity (at $.10 per kilowatt hour). If these cars are ever built, they ought to sell like hotcakes.

But wait a minute! How do you plug the car into an electric outlet and refill tanks of hydrogen and oxygen? Anuvu is working with several makers of electrolysis units, which convert electricity and water into hydrogen and oxygen. Their plan is to sell these units along with the car, and they will operate while the car is parked in the garage. Anuvu engineers calculate that their car can be refueled using a standard 110 volt outlet in about eight hours. Usually the refueling time would be much shorter, however, since typical daily driving is well under 700 miles. If there is any weakness in Anuvu’s plan, it’s whether or not the authorities will allow homeowners to have hydrogen filling stations in their garages. But that’s part of a larger issue surrounding hydrogen power, and time is on the side of the hydrogen advocates. Even if regulations delay home deployment, there is a huge market for these cars in commercial vehicle fleets.

Hodges has taken several technologies that have only recently reached fruition, and designed them into his car in a way that is a tour-de-force of efficiency and simplicity. For example, he has designed the car to have an onboard PC, which might seem superfluous until he points out that the PC will regulate much of the functions of the engines and power systems, as well as play CDs and the radio. So sure, the car has an internet connection and a PC, but the PC happened to also be the most cost-effective, space-efficient way to perform other essential tasks.

Rex Hodges & Lyn Cowgill in front of their lab

Anuvu is funded by private equity investors. They intend to raise $5 million to build a prototype of this car. After a possible mezzanine round of another $5 million, they intend to do an IPO to raise $200 million to build a factory. Their goal is to produce and sell 50,000 cars by 2005, which along with sales of their fuel cells in other market areas would equate to revenue in that year of $2 billion. That should get the attention of some venture capitalists! With only the designs complete, it is premature to say if all the promise embodied in Anuvu’s car will definitely be realized, but the coherence and uncompromising totality of the vision is compelling.

With Anuvu, ultimately, the prevailing question isn’t whether or not the engineering concept they have developed and refined over the last several years will blow the doors off anything on wheels. It will. It’s brilliant. But will Anuvu get this car out of the lab and onto the highway? Will they make the dramatic changes required by every entrepreneur who develops a world-changing product? Auto manufacturing is heavy industry, and if the Anuvu car ever hits the road in any quantity, the company that builds it will bear faint resemblance to the company today. Rex Hodges took the plunge, and bet his career on a vision that is halfway to fruition. To go the rest of the distance, he will have to let new players into the game, and see his company take on a life of its own. That is Anuvu’s challenge.

Who will be the first to manufacture truly cost-competitive Photovoltaic cells?

In a small lab in sunny Inglewood, California, EcoWorld has discovered Dr. Vijay Kapur, who for 29 years has been at the forefront of research and development of photovoltaics. Formerly Director of Research for Arco Solar, with a PHD in Chemistry, Kapur’s current venture is International Solar Electric Technology, Inc.

Investors take note, when we caught up with Dr. Kapur, he was in the lab working on systems which he says are ready for deployment and only require an infusion of capital. He believes he his patented “copper indium gallium selenide” technology can yield photovoltaic panels that will produce electricity at a production cost of $.60 per watt. If he was to sell these to distributors for $1.20 per watt, that would still be nearly 70% cheaper than anything currently available, since present day prices hover around $4.00 per watt to distributors.

ISET PV Mini-Module

For a long, long time, environmentalists and solar power enthusiasts were telling us that the price of electricity generated by fossil fueled power plants would keep rising and the cost of electricity from photovoltaics would continue to fall, and that the day would come when PVs could economically compete with fossil fuels. That day has been a long time coming indeed. “Even ten years ago, $4.00 per watt modules were unthinkable,” said Kapur, “wireless and space communication systems have driven demand way up and advanced the technology for PVs.”

Bringing the cost down far enough to help faciliate the revolution in satellite communications was the first leap forward for PVs, but the next one, bringing the cost down enough to compete with your local utility is an even greater leap. Before going further, how does the cost per watt translate to cost per kilowatt hour?

First of all, recognize that the cost of the PV panels is only about half the cost to install a working system. The complete costs must include the power converter, grounding, panel support structures, and installation costs. Therefore the true cost, currently, for PV systems is about $10 per watt. A simplistic but helpful formula to turn this into cost per kilowatt hour requires the following steps:

On this basis, today’s price for photovoltaics makes them nonviable for commercial power generation when they have to compete head-to-head with power utilities burning fossil fuels, at least in a normal market. Costs per kilowatt hour from conventional sources, notwithstanding peak costs and price spikes brought on by temporary bottlenecks in the system, are about $.10 per kilowatt hour, less than a third the cost of PV systems.

If the costs for photovoltaic panels to the consumer comes down to around $1.50 per watt, and subsystem costs don’t also fall, PVs will still have a hard time being competitive. But subsystem costs will drop, especially inverters (power converters) which are benefitting from increasing demand not only for use with photovoltaics but also with fuel cells and windmills. Moreover, “volume and standardization will lower costs to install systems, current prices are $1.00 or more per watt for installation, which is ridiculous,” said Kapur.

“Costs of around $2.00 to $2.50 per watt for delivered systems are feasible,” said Kapur, which would translate to a cost to the consumer per kilowatt hour of about $.07. When this happens, the idea of an energy crisis could be a thing of the past.

Who will win the race to build dramatically cheaper photovoltaics? Will it be Vijay Kapur at ISET Inc.?

According to the directory in the “PV Power Resource Site,” there are 97 companies in the world manufacturing photovoltaic panels. The true number of organizations involved in this effort, when including companies that are pre-manufacturing, and research labs, is undoubtedly much higher. The race is on. The stakes are high.

Jonathan Brewer

When Jonathan Brewer headed west in 1981 to seek his fortune in the goldfields of California, you would think he came 132 years too late. Not so. There’s still a lot of gold in the Sierra and the mining concerns that Brewer worked for in those early years are alive and well. But as fate would have it, the mining industry procedures Brewer learned to extract precious metal from the earth have found him fortune in an ironic twist, by inspiring a unique process he has invented to extract toxic waste from the earth.

EarthWorks Environmental (www.EarthWorksUSA.com) is the company founded from this inspiration, and Jonathan Brewer is well on his way to becoming a wealthy man, turning the solid waste processing industry on its ear, and helping the planet, all at once. The patented process that Brewer invented is not all that hard to grasp, it’s just that before he came along, nobody from the mining industry ever tried to tackle the problem of treating contaminated soils. What Brewer has done is built giant hammer mills that can pulverize virtually any type of soil. Chemical tanks on the machine then inject into the atomized soil chemical reactants that neutralize the toxins.

The Eureka

The machines are impressive. Brewer’s latest model, the “Empire” (all of his models are named after famous California mines), can process up to 220 cubic yards of soil per hour. The centerpiece is a 1000 pound roter made from heat-treated steel that spins at 1200 RPM and can reduce to dust up to 6 inch diameter boulders of reinforced concrete.

The benefits of this type of soil remediation are many. Most significantly, conventional methods of soil remediation require the contaminated soil to be removed to an approved toxic waste dump. The problem of the toxins is not eliminated, the toxins are merely relocated. Brewer’s machine cleans the soil completely, allowing it to remain on the original site, and solving the problem forever. “A lot of property owners don’t know that when they have toxic soil removed to a dump, they still have liability for any harm that the toxins may cause,” said Brewer. The soil that comes out of Brewer’s machines is so clean you can use if for a sandbox, or a vegetable garden. Brewer likened the appearance of the soil to “coffee grounds” and said that when they did a project in Wyoming, “the company had to hire a security guard to protect from theft the piles of treated soil because it was the best topsoil in the whole state.”

At work in Gillete, WY

Another key advantage to Brewer’s technology is that in one process both inorganic and organic toxins can be eliminated from soil. “We can treat any toxin for which there is an existing chemical methodology to degrade,” said Brewer. Also, the process can be completed in as long as it takes to run the soil through the machine. The key to the quick reaction is that the pulverizing process reduces the contaminated soil to dust, which has an extremely high surface area to volume ratio, allowing the neutralizing chemicals to be sprayed onto the surface of the dust and almost immediately permeate virtually all the molecules in the soil.

EarthWorks claims their process is much cheaper than other methods of soil cleanup, perhaps by as much as 35%, and unlike trucking the contaminated soil to a toxic waste dump, the soil is cleaned, yielding a permanent solution. Companies and property owners are taking notice. EarthWorks has already done some big cleanups, including 3,500 cubic yards of diesel contaminated soil in Gilette, Wyoming, 2,200 cubic yards of gasoline and MTB contaminated soil in Eureka, California, and 9,000 tons (ongoing) of soil in Santa Rosa, California, contaminated with heavy metals.

Rotor from the Eureka

What does the future hold for EarthWorks? Brewer intends to contract manufacture his soil cleaning machines and license them to the big players in the soil remediation industry. This means he’ll have customers like Radian, TRW, Bechtel, as well as end-users such Chevron who often do their own remediation. The business, of course, has great international potential; Brewer just completed a bid to a major oil company to clean up a site in Brazil.

EarthWorks was founded in 7-95 and incorporated in 7-98. They have four employees and are based in Roseville, California. They are self-funding their expansion and have no long-term debt. Brewer projects having about 100 active machines by 2003, yielding $30 million in annual revenue by that time. That’s an awful lot of toxic soil being turned into potting soil.