Articles, poems and commentaries
by Alyssa A. Lappen
Forbes | Mar. 26, 1984
Vol. 133, No. 6, p. 66
Environmental protection agency
by Alyssa A. Lappen
Forbes | Dec. 19, 1983
Vol. 132, No. 23, pp. 192-193
818 words
For all the talk about cleaning up toxic waste, something like 98% of it is still being dumped or buried. It should be simple enough to find a better solution and cash in on what ought to be a huge business opportunity. But in waste management, the solutions are as complex as the chemicals meant to be cleaned up.
The biggest impediment to a technological solution, many companies feel, is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Its bureaucracy is so labyrinthine and the rules to administer the agency’s Superfund–a $770 million kitty designated specifically for toxic waste cleanups–are so entangled, that money for testing promising new technologies is rarely made available to outsiders, or even to those inside the agency.
That has hurt companies like Lopat Enterprises, Inc. This tiny Asbury Park, N.J. firm last year developed a product called K-20, which coats, and thereby renders harmless, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), the deadly substance once used in all electrical transformers. Unlike incineration, which treats PCBs collected for disposal, K-20 can treat them in situ, so that buildings whose walls and ceilings were contaminated by PCBs during transformer fires no longer have to be closed down. Used commercially for the first time in October, K-20 reduced PCB contamination at a Pacific Gas & Electric site in California, from 60 parts per million to 0.1 parts per million in five days, according to Lopat President Louis Flax.
Sounds great. The problem is, many companies that might be inclined to try a new technique first want the EPA’s blessing before they get involved. In the case of K-20, the EPA has given no indication that it will get involved. The EPA says it has a solution for bulk PCBs: incineration. But the agency adds that it’s not in the business of approving, much less favoring, products that might clean contaminated buildings.
Does this mean that K-20 is a product with no market? Maybe yes, maybe no. No one inside or outside the EPA seems to know. “The whole thing is a bureaucratic merry-go-round,’ says Flax. “My brain is scrambled at this point.’
K-20 isn’t the only promising process languishing at the EPA’s door, says Joel Hirschhorn of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. “The EPA doesn’t have a formal program, if any, to deal with situations where innovative technology comes along,’ he says. “It is holding back their commercialization.’
If industry refuses to act without approval, should the EPA get into the testing business? The Reagan Administration thinks not, preferring to let the market work out its own problems. But where legal liability rears its ugly head, the market is often constrained. Nobody exposes himself to the risk of expensive litigation when there are cheaper solutions available. That is one reason most waste is still treated in the time-honored method: landfill.
Government has been around this block before. At the turn of the century, similar concerns led to the establishment of the Food & Drug Administration. While it performs almost no tests of new products and technologies on its own, the FDA reviews the experimental data that support those claims. The process has proved remarkably effective in delivering consistently high-quality medicines and pure food to the American public.
Then there is the National Bureau of Standards model. Their own laboratories test products and processes for other federal agencies, and set standards for performance in such areas as fire safety and use of hazardous materials in the work place. Either model should allow the EPA to perform an effective role in ensuring that the best technologies are made available.
Although the EPA has continued to duck any role in promoting technology, it may soon have no choice. A revised version of the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA) has passed in the House; Senate action will have to wait until next year. If it passes–the betting now is that it will–a twist of logic embedded in the legislation should force a greater use of technology: The bill pending gives companies that claim no alternative up to 54 months to come up with nondumping solutions for their most toxic wastes. If they don’t, the EPA must mandate a high-technology solution, irrespective of cost. Given EPA and industry laxity to date, it is almost certain that industry’s hand will be forced sometime in the late 1980s. Congress, apparently skeptical of the EPA’s willingness to get tough, chose to substitute time for action. A provision that would have forced the EPA to make companies use, within two years, the best available technology for their cleanups was written out of the bill. “After all,’ says Christopher Harris, counsel to the House commerce, transportation and tourism subcommittee, which helped shape the RCRA rewrite, “the last time the EPA tried to make rules in this area, it took them five years, and look where they got.’
[WARNING: Do NOT cross-post this article; it is for PERSONAL USE only.]
Solar energy’s growing
by Alyssa A. Lappen
Forbes | Aug. 15, 1983
Vol. 132, No. 15, 1983
757 words
Solar cells are 3-inch silicon discs that make electricity from sunlight. Since February 108 16-foot-long arrays of these cells have been tracking the desert sun over 20 acres of Hesperia, Calif., quietly manufacturing a megawatt of electricity. Built in nine months by Atlantic Richfield’s Arco Solar subsidiary, the facility now sells enough power to Southern California Edison to service 400 homes and is the largest such plant in the world.
This may be only the beginning. Arco Solar is already at work on a 16-megawatt facility for Pacific Gas & Electric in San Luis Obispo County, Calif. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District has broken ground for a $12 million 1-megawatt photovoltaic station at Rancho Seco, Calif. and plans another 99 megawatts over the next ten years. Foster City, Calif.-based United Energy Corp. has sold a megawatt of photovoltaic generators to third-party investors in Davis, Calif. and is also building a station with over 5 megawatts of power at Borrego Springs, Calif.
Worldwide, the photovoltaics industry has nearly tripled in size since 1980, to about $100 million last year, and the 9.2 megawatts of solar cells produced worldwide in 1982 was double 1981’s production. And here’s good news: The U.S. has 60% of the world market. Nearly 40 companies, 17 of them in the U.S., sell solar cells worldwide.
It is good news, too, that the oil glut hasn’t squelched this intant industry even though the price for solar generating plants is extraordinary and the power they supply is but a drop in the ocean. “It costs $1 to $2 a watt right now for coal or unclear, and photovoltaics is about $10 a watt,’ says Paul Maycock, a top photovoltaics consultant in Alexandria, Va. What’s keeping solar energy alive? The fact that it lends itself to smallscale generating plants, for one thing. “The electric utility industry must move away from the tradition of large, capital-intensive, baseload plants,’ says William Gould, chairman of Southern California Edison. Why so? Because demand for electricity is growing at historic lows and so expansion in small increments has become desirable.
That probably will not mean an increase in the rooftop solar systems first envisaged by the “small is beautiful’ crowd, except in remote locations. Rather, says Andrew Krantz, head of the Department of Energy’s photovoltaic systems research branch, it means the construction of solar generating plants as a supplement to larger, conventional power plants. “Our calculations show that you begin to arrive at economies of scale in solar power at about 20 megawatts a year of production,’ he says. At that level, the price of solar panels would fall to $3 or $3.50 a watt. That’s a long way from the current $10 figure, but Krantz believes Arco should reach the 20-megawatt point in early 1985.
Spurring the solar market onward are generous tax breaks. “The great thing is that tax credits are stimulating large central facilities ten years before they are going to be economic,’ says Maycock. The federal government gives businesses a 15% tax credit for photovoltaic investment, in addition to the usual 10% investment tax credit, and there are state solar tax credits.
Such tax credits have encouraged photovoltaic tax shelters. United Energy’s projects, sold last year, were among the first. Solarex, the number two solar cell manufacturer, with perhaps $20 million in sales, is negotiating to set up third-party-financed photovoltaic facilities for several major utilities. Arco Solar also plans to use third-party funds for part of its Pacific Gas & Electric facility.
As in other areas technological, Japan is potentially a big player. The Japanese photovoltaics industry is still small. Maycock says it produced only 700 kilowatts of cells last year, mostly through the rather inefficient amorphous silicon method.
Those solar cells sold for between $25 and $30 a watt, he says, and went into watches, calculators, battery chargers and a few solar panels, for $20 million in manufacturer-level sales. But Japan’s fledgling industry, led by Sharp, Sanyo and Fuji, is already making a profit, while the U.S. industry overall is not. And Maycock thinks the Japanese will gain a 35% share of the world photovoltaics market by 1990.
Not surprisingly, the U.S. industry uses those projections as an argument for continuing the tax breaks. But Uncle Sam and the states may grow tired of extending those liberal credits. The federal credits are due to expire in 1985, and state credits are under siege in California and Massachusetts. A sure case of penny wise, pound foolish.
[WARNING: Do NOT cross-post this article; it is for PERSONAL USE ONLY.]
by Alyssa A. Lappen
Forbes | Aug. 15, 1983
Vol. 132, No. 15, p. 105
348 words
There are several types of solar cells, but they all work on the same principle: Semiconductorgrade silicon, formed into wafers, absorbs light, producing electrically charged particles and emitting a current that is collected through attached wires.
The most common production method is the Czochralski process, in which a large silicon crystal is “grown’ from a molten liquid in a furnace and then sliced into wafers. Raw polysilicon is melted to 2,200 degrees F, and a speck of silicon crystal is implanted. As the material is heated and turned, a sausagelike crystal emerges, up to 36 inches long and 150 pounds in weight. The wafers are sliced off by diamond blades and then processed into solar cells.
The Czochralski cells have over a 60% share of the market. The efficiency of panels of cells–the percentage of surface sunlight they turn into electricity–has reached a respectable 11%, even in mass production. But a prime disadvantage is the $45-per-kilogram cost of the raw material.
Semicrystalline cells make up about another 20% of the market. These are made chiefly by Solarex, a Rockville, Md. company that uses a “dirtier,’ less expensive polysilicon raw material. Instead of “growing’ crystals, Solarex casts the silicon into square ingots. The square wafers that are cut from the ingot have a better packing density and area efficiency on panels than their round Czochralski cousins. The semicrystalline cells get about a 10% to 12% efficiency when mass produced, but Solarex has produced cells in the lab that get about 18%. The company thinks it can reduce its cost to perhaps $5 per kilogram by the end of the decade by making its own silicon feedstock from quartz and sand.
Amorphous silicon solar cells have about 15% of the world market, but are only 5% to 6% efficient and are made primarily by the Japanese for consumer products like watches, calculators and battery chargers. American labs are working to improve this technology, too. Ribbon cells, made by Mobil Solar, resemble 2-inch steel ribbons and as yet account for less than 1% of the market.
[WARNING: Do NOT cross-post this article; it is for PERSONAL USE ONLY.]
NUMBERS GAME
by Alyssa A. Lappen
Forbes | Aug. 17, 1981
Vol. 127, No. 15, pp. 78-79
Who has been making a killing in Conoco
By Alyssa A. Lappen
Forbes | Aug. 3, 1981
Vol. 127, No. 14, p.38
WARNING: This file is for the reader’s personal use only. It may not be copied, distributed or cross-posted on other websites.