 of clean energy, my favorite state. I'm your host, Mitch Ewan. Our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. That's a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm pleased again, yet again, to welcome our guests, Toby Kincaid, a true pioneer in the solar industry who I've known for what, almost 35, 40 years going now, not quite 40 years, but a long time. And he just got over COVID and he's a real champ. He should have been a submariner because he has a real get up and go attitude, which I love. So welcome to the show, Toby. And we're going to delve into your history of solar. And you have a lot of knowledge about the solar industry. I mean, you form most of it, I think. But we're going to have a brief history of the solar industry. So Toby, over to you. And I think a good place to start is just to start off and tell us what is solar energy anyway, just as a background to get us all into the subject. Sure. Well, all of the ancients knew that the whole world is solar powered. So it's a very intimate thing. But back in the day, everyone kind of thought solar energy was one thing, sunlight. Actually, that's kind of a misnomer. It really should be called sunlight. So back in time, let's go back to 1666. Isaac Newton famously painted his dorm room black. The windows were all black. And he scraped off a little bit of the paint so a little beam of light could come in. And when he was developing his work on optics, he would put this prism in and he'd say, oh, that's extraordinary. Sunlight isn't one thing. It's seven things, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. And this was an extraordinary thing because now sunlight was many things and it had a lot of intrigue. Well, when Newton developed his optics, he really taught us there's two kinds of optics, geometric optics where the wavelength doesn't matter and physical optics where the wavelength really matters. So in geometric optics, for example, if you had a reflector, you might have heard of angle of incidence equals angle of reflection. Well, that's true. It doesn't matter what the wavelength is. But when Newton put his prism there and refracted those lights out, oh my goodness, all the different colors, that really kind of was a game changer and that's physical optics where the wavelength really matters. So if you take a stick and put it in a glass of water and you see it bend, that's the different wavelengths traveling through water at different speeds. So Isaac Newton kind of opened the door that sunlight is far more involved than simply one thing. Well, then we fast forward to 1799 and Sir Herschel, Sir William Herschel, climbed a mountain and he wanted to duplicate Newton's experiment. So he put up a tent, cut a hole in it, had a beam of light go in, put a prism there and he had a table and he had his red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. And what he wanted to do is ask the question, hey, do each color, do they have different temperatures? So he started putting thermometers on each of the colors. Kind of interesting. Well, he brought more thermometers than he needed. So he put a few off to the right and started making his measurements. And then famously, he kind of looks over and notices, oh my goodness, beyond the red where there shouldn't be anything, all of my thermometers are hot. What's going on? What's this? And he said, there must be something in the solar spectrum, which we cannot see, but definitely has a lot of energy. And he discovered infrared. So now the seven colors of light became eight. So then in the same spirit, Johann Ritter said, okay, what about the other side? Is there some energy we can't see on the other side of light? Yeah, the violet. And so he took some photographic paper very early on, which is just paper and silver chloride. And they noticed if you put that in the sun, it turns black really fast. But if you shine yellow light or red light or blue light or green light, it wouldn't turn black very rapidly. But as you move towards the shorter wavelengths towards the blues and the indigo and the violet, it would accelerate and turn black faster and faster. So I thought, okay, I'm going to repeat the experiment of rehearsal. And then I'm going to put some of this photographic paper beyond the violet and see what happens. And lo and behold, it turned black. And he goes, oh my goodness, there is energy in the solar spectrum shorter than the violets, what we call now ultraviolet. And this now turns seven, eight, now we have nine things in sunlight. Wow. So it's a really kind of an amazing optical soup of all these different colors. Well, there was a big mystery in the 1800s. They just they knew about ultraviolet light. And when they were experimenting with electricity, they would shine it onto some metal. And they noticed that electricity was formed. Now, when they shine red light, orange light, yellow light and blue light, nothing happens. But when they shine ultraviolet light on metal, suddenly electricity is happening. And they're like, what's going on? Well, no way to understand this. And the whole mystery wasn't solved until 1905. And in 1905, Einstein published these five papers, the special relativity, general relativity, a couple of papers on Brownian movement, which is how atoms would drift around. But his fifth paper changed the world. And that was the photoelectric effect. And what he pointed out was, and this is his famous equation, that if you can see it on the screen, what he said is the energy you're measuring in the electricity, the kinetic energy of the electrons is going to equal the energy of the photon minus heat. And he was the working function of the material, kind of the resistance of the material. So he defined light as hf. The energy would be Planck's constant, this really small number times the frequency. So the higher the frequency, the higher the energy. And this turned out to be absolutely revolutionary. Now, there's kind of an analog in music. So if I make a tone, if I have that higher tone, what's happened? Well, I've doubled the frequency. So the ancient Greeks knew, for example, if you took a string, stretch it tight and pluck it, you'd get a sound. Then if you pinch it halfway and pluck it, you get an octave higher. You doubled the frequency. So this was kind of a really important realization that every color of light contains more energy. And the higher the frequency, the higher the energy. Now, this turns out to be the father, the turning point of not only solid state physics and photovoltaics making electricity directly from sunlight, but this is the basis of all of our modern solid state devices all came back to Einstein's equation, where everyone thinks of E equals mc squared. But, you know, that's esoteric. But as far as this equation of the connective energy of electricity equals the energy of a photon minus the work function of a material, that was incredible. And so I'll set up the basis now for how a photovoltaic cell works. And what they do briefly is they take two sheets of silicon and they diffuse some boron on one side. And on the other sheet, they put some phosphorus. Now, boron has one less electron than silicon. So relative to silicon, it's more positive. And then with the phosphorus, it has one more electron than silicon. So it's more negative. And when you put the positive and the negative, the P and the N junction together, you have a solar cell. And what they do is they put some grids, some wires on the top and on the back, and you connect a wire from the front through a light or some load to the back. And Einstein tells us that because silicon, for example, has this work function, this band gap, they call it, of 1.1 electron volts. So Einstein's saying if you want to make electricity, anything below that, below the red light, longer in wavelength, you won't make a single electron. But if you get above 1.1 electron volts, hey, you're going to start knocking out electrons. And so Einstein really gave us our modern world with this photoelectric effect. And we've got this amazing spectrum of these. It's not sunlight as one broadband spectrum. That's not quite accurate. It's actually a collection of these very narrow bands. And now, with all of this together, we can do three major things with solar energy. With the longer wavelengths, we could do photothermal. So you're going to keep something up. In the visible and middle wavelengths, you can do photovoltaics as long as the electron has more energy than the band gap. And that's what Einstein taught us. And then you have the higher wavelengths doing photochemistry. And the most important, of course, would be photosynthesis, which uses a very narrow band of red and a very, very narrow band of blue. And you drive all of the photosynthesis that actually provides all the oxygen on earth and all of the base nutrition. So even if you ate an animal that only eats meat, eventually you're going to add an animal down the food chain that ate a plant. So it's the plant kingdom that is as our lifeblood here on planet Earth. So that sets the scene that solar energy is a really dynamic. If you were to look at the sun, you would see all different points of light, all different colors all going everywhere. And so this was the basis of our modern understanding of solar energy. Well, that's totally fascinating. And that was what in the 1700s, that's not that long ago, I don't think. We've come a long ways in a couple of centuries. And it's certainly after Einstein, as you say, a century later, and we do things they would have never imagined. So solar energy is dynamic and it provides, well, can provide everything. So the ancient Greeks captured solar energy. How about telling us a little bit about what they did? That was back in the BC BC before cars. Yeah, this was back now. Now, how do humans use solar energy? Well, let's go back or forward from when we were talking about to 25 centuries ago, so fifth or sixth century BC. Now, Wow, Greeks had a problem. They didn't have any fuel. This was the Bronze Age and everyone's burning wood. So where do you get wood? In the fourth century BC, it was a death sentence. If you cut down an olive tree to make charcoal or to burn it, it was so vital to the economy. So the idea of an energy crisis dogs every civilization through time. Well, so they didn't have any wood. So Socrates, for example, he used to say that the ideal house would be cool in the summer and warm in the winter. And so what a concept. It's a wonderful philosophy of life, right? So in architecture, what the Greeks figured out is if they did the first of the east, west, north, south streets, so that everyone had access to solar energy. Actually, access to solar energy was a human right long before the idea of voting for anything. So it's kind of an amazing the kind of humanity that they recognize that everyone has to have some heat and some light. And so with architecture, what the what the Greeks did and they were really freaked out about this this deforestation. I remember Plato wrote poems of lament of his dear Attica that it was deforested in all the soft and rich parts have fallen away and that only the bees can survive, you know, because everything was cut down. So this was a big issue. So they thought about it and realized, okay, let's start innovating something. They took any window or door and above it, they would create an Eve. So during the high sun, it would shade. But when the sun was low in the winter, it was allowed access into the portico or into the windows and buildings. And so on that picture, you can kind of see where they had all of these things that they would recommend that you would now here you have a kind of a portico in the center where you had a cistern. So the southern part is kind of the lower right hand side. And you could see the slope would allow the sunlight at low angles to reach the northern part of the house and go in through the portico and into the into the north facing rooms. And it would heat up the floor and they would have that radiant heat. So you can imagine people padding around on the warm stones, you know, in winter. Fantastic. And Socrates and many others had all kinds of advice. If you're going to build a second store, you build it on the north side. So you because if you build it on the south side, you shade the rooms in the north, you didn't want to do that. So all of these techniques. And here you have this house, which not only had lighting and heating through the winter, but you also had the roofs collecting rainwater and the cistern in the center. So what a remarkable, sustainable way to have a house 25 centuries ago. Yeah, they didn't have computers in those days to figure it all out like we do. I guess they all they had like a scroll of papyrus and they draw it out and figure it out and think about it. Oh, very much. And then execute it and experiment. It's really fascinating to talk about this. Amazing. So solar energy wasn't just esoteric to the ancient Greeks. It was life to the ancient Greeks. So now let's move forward in history and let's maybe go to the ancient Romans. Now the greenhouse effect was long known by the Romans. They had the hypocost where they would burn wood and had hollow walls and floors to heat up their baths. But they noticed that they had usually three baths, a very hot one, a medium one and a cool one. And in the medium one, they'd simply would make some windows to the top, put some glass blazing over it. And not only did you get light in the bath, but it would actually help trap heat. Now Caesar was famous for loving a particular fruit. I'm trying to remember cucumbers. He loved cucumbers. So he had his gardeners create little greenhouses so that they could move it around during the wintertime and grow cucumbers for the emperor. So the greenhouse effect was very long understood. And so by the ancients, they made tremendous use of solar energy technology in the most practical way they could. And that's kind of fascinating because they had a big fuel problem. Wood, you know, by the third century BC, a third of Italy was denuded of trees. Everyone was burning wood because how are you going to cook? How are you going to get some heat? And most importantly, how are you going to smelt iron? Now the Bronze Age, that was copper and tin and you're still making high temperature. But when we get to iron, they had to make 3000 degrees, lots of wood. So the Romans had a fleet, a Navacari Lombardi, something of that nature in land, ship fleets, and they would send around soldiers and stop somewhere, deploy some soldiers. The rest of them would cut down the trees, hew the trees, big dig pits and throw the trees in and light them on fire and then cover it with dirt. In a couple of weeks, it would leech out all the impurities and you're left with charcoal and they would import that back. So the idea of wood and fuel was a massive problem for the ancient Romans. They actually imported wood from the Caucasus, which was 1000 miles away from Rome. So this was the energy crisis always dogs everybody. Okay, so moving forward to the 1830s when people actually started to cook with solar, why don't you talk a little bit about that? Sure. Now we're kind of jumping on passing over like 2000 years. So what was the big thing in that brief period and I don't have a drawing for you was burning years. Now back in the ancient Greeks, one of the things they did in Greece is they take a little bowl and pound some silver really thin or gold and they would make a reflector and the Vestal Virgins would start the holy fire from the golden rays of the sun. And so there was no pollution of men making fire. And even in Mesoamerica we see that they did the same thing and all the villagers would run up to the temple many miles away and they would light the fire from this initial fire, bring all the flames all the way back to the villages and then everyone would start their fire and so it was this holy connection to the life giving energy of the sun. In Mesoamerica the gold was actually tears of the sun. So just wonderful romantic notions. Okay. So I'm going to fast forward burning mirrors for the thing and they made them larger and larger. Francis Bacon in the 13th century proposed burning mirrors for the crusaders and the crusades. He was thrown in jail for probably a variety of things because he was quite outspoken. But so the idea of burning mirrors was a really big thing. Okay. So now we've jumped forward to the 1830s, late 1830s. And here we have the father of concentrating solar energy. His name is Augustine Machot. Machot was a French brilliant mathematician, later a professor. But when he was a young man, he went to the French Academy of Sciences and said, hey, give me a grant because I have some designs for solar cooking and other apparatus that would be great for the French foreign legion. Now the French foreign legions were in mostly in North Africa, Morocco and Libya. There's no trees. There's no wood. So if you have 200 soldiers and they're doing whatever soldiers do and they come back to the commissary, what are you going to feed them? Some cold gruel or something? So the Academy of Sciences said, oh soccer, you know, see the players here do it. And so he traveled there. And the soldiers loved him because if you hold up that slide, what he did in the beginning is he designed these little tripods. And he had the little reflectors that would fold out like an upside down umbrella. And they pounded silver very thin in these little slacks. And then in the middle, he put a carafe or kind of a hot pot. And you put in your potatoes, your carrots, your onions, put in a little wine, a little meat. If you have fish, put fish and rabbits, rabbits. Okay. So he put a little beef, if you're lucky, and salt and pepper and close it up. And so for four or five hours in the hot sun in Libya, someone would come around and kind of adjust it and move it manually to follow the sun. And then at the end of the day, everyone had this fantastic beef stew that was, it's like a solar crock pot. And it was just delicious. And you know, the two cultures that, to me, the French and the Japanese take their food very serious. So for the French, it was quite extraordinary. And so Machaud was really on the path here and he was extraordinary. Now, on that lower part of that drawing, you'll see where he did something revolutionary. He combined two things that have never been combined before. He took the light trapping glass of a greenhouse and combined it with a burning mirror. So what he did is he took this kind of glass fixture and put an insert of metal inside, and then put it, you put in your potatoes, carrots, and everything else. And then you, you cover the top and then put it in the sun. And the sunlight would warm up one half of it, but the, to get the backside or the north side, he put this burning mirror reflector a couple of feet back and it would shine on the back. And after again, four or five hours, you would have the most selectable stew. And you imagine, you know, you think of army rations being pretty tough. Imagine in the middle 1800s what they were, but the French were, were enjoying these wonderful, these wonderful home cooked meals. No, they loved Machaud. And then that bottom one, Machaud did something really extraordinary is he took off the top, put a bunch of wine in it, and then he had a bulb that he would put on the top with a little flute coming off. And that was a condenser. And so when you heat the wine with the sun, that the alcohol would evaporate at a lower temperature than the water, go up, hit the top bulb and then kind of seep through that little flute and give up heat and condense into liquid and would drip into the most marvelous brandy. So here he's stilling wine with a brandy. Yeah, you got all the French. No, very practical. But everyone was thrilled with this guy. And he also built water distillers. And that was a big thing for all around the world, like in Indonesia, or in Indochina, where they had different colonies, is you couldn't drink the water. There's too many diseases. You had to boil it. That took lots of fuel. So it was a great innovation. He started building distillers. This guy was amazing. And then the next slide, if you go to that, he did another thing is he created a water pump that had no moving parts, no fuel gauze. And what he did, if you could see, it's kind of hard to see, but on the right hand side, they would put water in this vessel, which had a glass top and kind of a metal bell jar inside. They'd fill it halfway up with water and then have a feed tube. They had a valve on the right side and you'd turn off. So once you prime it and then put the tube into the water you wanted to draw, you just let it sit. It wouldn't drain out because it's kind of a hydrostatically would hold the water there. But what happens is the sunlight goes to the glass, heats up the bell jar. The bell jar would heat up the internal air and the air would expand and push on that column. And instead of nature takes the path of least resistance, so it couldn't push the water back down the well. But it could when you open the valve, push it up that little thing to the left that's a little tube and it would lift the water a meter high or something, a couple feet up. And everyone was astounded now. It wasn't a very powerful water pump, but here you have Masho designing and building quite an engineer himself, as well as a mathematics prodigy. And he became a professor at Tours in mathematics. But his dream was to power steam engines. Oh, yeah. We have something about that. Oh yeah. Now France had an energy crisis, you know, like we've heard before, and they were trying to compete with England in the first industrial revolution. Well, England had lots of coal and it was near the surface and they had railroads that were coming online and they only had to go kind of a short distance. France was a big disadvantage. Now they had coal, but it was way south in the Pyrenees. And so they didn't really have the railroads to bring it. So Masho goes back to the Academy of Sciences and said, I'd like a grant to develop larger and larger steam engines. And they said, Oh, wonderful. Go for it. So he started building these large steam engines. And if you go to the next slide, I say in the 1870s, but there was a lot of trouble this 1870s. Napoleon III declares war on Prussia. Prussia promptly goes in and sacks half of France. So they had a problem there, but they got to his lab and the Prussians took everything. Thirty years of all his prototypes, all his work, his library, all his papers, he was wiped out. And I think it kind of gave him almost a mental breakdown. Poor Masho. But he had an assistant called Piffray. And Piffray said, I want to continue your work. And he said, please, please continue this. So what you're seeing is kind of my sketch of a wood block I saw from 1879, 1880. And there was the Paris Exposition. And so here's Piffray building this big steam engine that would shine a conic reflector like he developed before onto the central boiler. And he ran a steam engine with all the Parisians walking by with top hats and parasols. And he ran a steam engine that ran a printing press and when print out bills that say, hey, you're just looking at a solar produced printing, you know, this is 1880. So Piffray was taking on what Masho had developed. And Masho, this was around the world, people were astounded by this. How could you run a steam engine with solar energy? And how could you do it in Paris? It's not a really sunny place. Right. Right. So the big thing that everyone was really trying to do was water pump. Because, you know, this is a time when they didn't have the modern oil age, they didn't electricity was just not quite yet until the 1890s. So the idea of farmers everywhere around the world trying to pump water, they had to bring, they had to run a steam engine with coal or wood. But that was problematic. It's your remote farm. How are you going to get all this fuel? So Masho had this dream. He wanted to set the world free at an industrial revolution of solar energy. So an extraordinary man in what he did. Okay. Okay. So now we've got a minute, we've got a minute and a half. Oh, oh, so soon. I'm so sorry. Okay, next slide. So this is what Masho did, inspired the work by Anais. And Anais had an ostrich farm in Pasadena, California, an ostrich farm. And what he did is he greeted the ostriches for the feathers. And he'd sell the feathers back east of New York for the women's hats. They had a fortune. Anyway, he was very enterprising. And so he started selling tickets. And I remember one of his ads, I remember reading, it said, come on the weekend and visit Pasadena to see the ostriches and, for no extra charge, see the solar motor. And so what Masho did, based on Masho, what Anais did, is he built a really big Masho conical concentrator as a water pump. Now, Anais had 300 acres of an orchard of citrus. And he was lucky because his water table was very shallow. It's only about 16 feet. But his engine pumped, get this, 1,400 gallons a minute. I had to look it up to be sure. Yeah, a minute. And everyone in Southern California and in Arizona, whether they're thinking, oh, this is going to be something incredible. And this is in the 1890s. But we'll go fast. So we jumped to the next slide. Now, he had some problems. A windstorm destroyed it, unfortunately. And so now I'm going to go back to the Civil War and talk about John Erickson. Now, John Erickson was the most famous nautical engineer in the world, everyone knew him, because he invented the monitor, the first iron clad of the Civil War. And he has, I think, 114 patents based on ships. He invented the propeller. So he said, after the war, I'm going to devote my life to solar engines so that we can grow food everywhere in the world and poverty could be eliminated. We don't have time, and I didn't write them down. But he had some beautiful quotes about how much he wanted to save the world. Okay, so let's go to the next slide. So Erickson set up this parabolic trough concentrator. Okay, he had some trouble as well. And then he was inspired or inspired a guy named Frank Schumann. Now, Frank Schumann was amazing because he went to Egypt and said, I'm going to build a big one. These are 200 feet long, these parabolic troughs, which would concentrate the sunlight down the center line. And he put some tubes and he was building a big water pumping system. Well, in 1911, his tubes were all made of zinc and they melted. I mean, as I read some of the newspaper articles, they said like, wilted rags. And so he goes, ah, I'm too good. I'm too hot. So he replaced them all with cast iron. And by 1913, he was pumping in the desert in Egypt for a cotton plantation, 6,000 gallons a minute. It was astounding. The whole world was just all by God, we're going to see this tremendous solar revolution. And of course, unfortunately, World War One happened and he was backed by Germans all in Deutsch marks. So when the war happened, all this money was worthless. And the eventually went into disrepair. But he had this wonderful photograph of women with their parasols walking around looking at this incredible solar machine that's going to change the nature of the world and pump water for all the farmers everywhere. So are we running out of time? We're out of time. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, we'll have to stop there. But so the quick takeaway would be that solar technology has evolved and humans have strived to make use of it. And boy, can we. We can do, Masha pointed out, and later Erickson, and the naus and Schumann, that you can do all of these things very practically. And this is 120 years ago. So, you know, it's amazing what these guys are doing. Yeah. Okay, we're gonna have to leave it there. Toby, I'd love to spend another half hour with you, but we only had the 30 minutes. You've been watching Hawaii, the state of clean energy on Think Tech Hawaii. And today we've been talking story with with Toby, who has a fascinating history of solar energy. And I could listen to it again, maybe we'll have to come back for a second half. And how smart these people were all the way back to the ancient Greeks, all the way up to like the late 1800s. Amazing what we have. So thank you so much, Toby, for educating us on this fascinating history. Thank you. And thanks to our visitors. I mean, our viewers are tuning in. I'm Mitch Ewan. We'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii, the state of clean energy, aloha.