 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm your host today, Mitch Ewan. Our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Storm, and that's a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm pleased once again to welcome our guest, Toby Kincaid, a pioneer in the solar industry. And today, we're going to talk a story about a brief history of solar energy. And this is part two. We just playing right out of time last show. And we still have a lot to talk about. And so he's going to grace us with this and sort of a little tagline is this week we're going to talk about powering engine with industrial sun. And the question mark I have for you, Toby, is what do you mean by an industrial sun? I don't think I've heard that term before. Is that a new term that you've just come up with? Well, it may well be. But I always think of it as the industrial sun, because that's the dream. That's more than a dream. As we go through this history, these innovators and inventors actually made this a reality. So the idea is, how can we have a solar industrial revolution and power all of the machines in our modern life? And that has been a challenge and is a challenge, but it's actually very much in the application. So Aloha, Commander, thanks for having me. Yeah, Aloha, yourself. Glad to have you back. And it's short notice, too. That's what I love about Toby, man. He's ready, willing, and able. And he's got a lot of good information that I wanted here. So let's start off with a little recap of just to get everybody into the mode of what solar is. Let me tell us, just to remind us what solar is all about. Sure. Well, the sun powers the natural world. The question is, why not the industrial? So last episode, we kind of did a quick review of what is the nature of solar energy? And we covered that Einstein in 1905 showed us that actually the energy in a photon is equal to H mu. H is Planck's constant, which is the smallest unit of energy. It's like n to the negative 19th joules. And that's a quanta. And you multiply that by the frequency of the light. So the higher the frequency, the higher the energy. So we kind of see it like red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo violet, ultraviolet would be an octave, but you can't see ultraviolet. So interestingly, the human being only sees less than one octave of light. And we know that the sun is just blasting out all this energy, all these charged particles, all this electromagnetic radiation. And it spans this wide spectrum of very low frequency radio waves, really low. And then all the way up through visible, all the way up to these super high energetic photons called gamma rays. And so the sun is blasting out an unimaginable amount of energy. And here we are on Earth. We're 93 million miles away. We received maybe less than 2 billionths of the entire irradiance of the sun. And yet in one day, we received more energy than we use in our civilization by 10,000 in that day. Well, no. So it's a vast resource, and it powers the natural world no small feat. So the great pursuit in this history is how can we use solar energy to actually run our modern world? And this was of great concern to the people through the 1800s. And of course, earlier, but in the 1800s, we really saw technology be applied. So now maybe we can jump back to where we left off with the macho. Now, let's talk about macho. In this next image, I tried to catch what macho and his assistant, Pefre, were doing in 1880 at the French Exposition. And you can imagine women with their beautiful hats and parasols and men in their finest with their top hats walking around the gardens. And they come across this solar engine that's driving a steam engine and is running a printing press. And that Pefre is printing out. He printed 500 copies of the journal Soleil, the solar journal. And what macho was doing, he's really the father of this high temperature steam engine and using solar energy to drive a steam engine. This was what he was doing. And last episode, we talked about all this. He had cookers. He had water distillers. He even made ice, which we'll get to in a little bit. This guy was extraordinary. And so what he did is he had this kind of this concentrator, this conic concentrator, almost looks like a lampshade turned upside down. And that would focus sunlight onto the center boiler, which he encased in a glass kind of greenhouse of a heat trapping glass. And inside, he had his cast iron boiler. Water would come in and he would boil the water and he'd pass that little tank, which is his cooling tower. We'll get to that. And he'd put the steam into a little steam engine. And there are all different kinds of steam engines in the 1800s. And one of the most popular was one they used in the railroads often where they'd have a piston and a little valve and it would go to the left and allow a path of steam to push the piston over and then it would shuttle over, close the first path and open another path to push the piston back. So you had this kind of... And they put a little flywheel on it so the pistons wouldn't seize and here he's running a steam engine. So the steam that would come out that was left over had enough pressure to go up into a coil that he had dropped into this big tank of cold water and condense it down back into water and then back to the boiler. So here he is in 1880. Demonstrating that the sun can do real work. He's the first to really actually demonstrate the industrial sun. So Macho was amazing, world famous, inspired people all over the world. But in 1880, a tragedy happened. All of his funding was cut off. Why? What happened was the French railroads and coal companies finally got together and went to the French Academy and said, why are you funding Macho? What are you gonna make everyone rich? No, we need to keep everyone down, you know, it's fun dust. So with probably some bribes. Unfortunately, the French Academy said, Macho, we're sorry, but the money stops. But Macho, who was heartbroken, of course, because he was at the pinnacle of his accomplishment, but Macho is also not only the father of concentrating solar energy for steam engines, but he also did something extraordinary in 1879. Now, the big question in the 1870s was, what's the best way to store solar energy? Now, you've heard that question even recently, people are debating it, you know, what is the best way? And Macho was amazing. He goes, the best way is to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen. You can put them in separate cylinders. And then when you need industrial heat, you bring them together, or you could use them separately. The oxygen could be used as a feedstock for industrial processes. And you could use the hydrogen as fuel. And here's the part that I'll never forget. He goes, hydrogen as a fuel is as precious as your disabundance. So, you know. The one word I'm hearing, Joe. Oh, this time. He was showing the world how to be in step industrially with the natural world. Now, this is Macho. So, he's not just talking, he actually built one. So, in his garden, in tours, he put a small conic concentrated together. Now, to make hydrogen and oxygen, you need an electrolyzer, but you need electricity. How do you generate electricity in 1879? No. No electricity. Well, he chose a thermoelectric generator, which was actually very mature at that point. And he's like, what, going from heat directly to electricity with no moving part? How did he do that? Well, in 1822, a German named Siebeck discovered if you took two wires of different metal and you solder one end and you solder the other end, and you put one end in a glass of ice water and the other over a flame, electricity is produced. And everyone went mad for this. Now, this is before Faraday in 1831, talked about the Faraday law of induction, which is conductors moving through changing magnetic fields, very dynamic, hence the dynamo. And so, all of this is being developed, but when Siebeck discovered this thermoelectric effect, Macho, now in 1879, actually could buy an off-the-shelf thermoelectric generator from a company called Clermont, and they produced 54 volts at 3 1⁄2 amps. Amazing. And what they found is Clermont would take little plates of different metals and you solder them together. And if you put heat across the junction, heat electricity will actually flow across the junction, like Siebeck demonstrated. Only thing is that temperature really lowers voltage. So the output of the voltage was clearly low. So you needed like 50 junction in series to make one volt. Well, Clermont put these all together at like 2,500 junctions and they used it. Actually, you would burn natural gas as the heat source or more likely town gas, which is a coal that you bake in an oxygen-free environment and it out gases, things like methane, a little bit of hydrogen, carbon monoxide. And this is how many towns would actually like their do outdoor lighting was burning town gas. Well, you know, you've got to wonder, well, what are they doing with the electricity in the 1850s, 60s, and 70s? And the answer turned out, electroplating. But my show built this thermoelectric generator, produced electricity, ran an electrolyzer, which surprisingly was a fairly common device because in the early electronic age, you could measure the voltage pretty easily with a galvanometer, but actually measuring the current in a circuit was kind of tricky back then. So what they did was they used a little pocket electrolyzer and you would put that in your circuit and measure how much hydrogen was involved over a certain amount of time. And that told you the amps. So he had an electrolyzer and so he put the electrolyzer to work and put hydrogen in a cylinder and oxygen in another cylinder. So my show is not only the father of running steam engines but really he's the father of what we now call green hydrogen. And this is 1879. Oh, my goodness. Okay, so this was, it's amazing, this guy. So talk to me about the hot box. Yeah, well, that's, now, now my show was kind of leading up on this high temperature effect, but actually there was also another line of research that looked at what this hot box does. Now, this was developed in 1767 by Dussassure. And Dussassure was a naturalist, very famous in Europe, and he wrote, it is a known fact. In fact, the fact probably known for a long time that a room or a carriage or any place gets hopper when solar rays pass through glass. So he was responding. Now, he's in the 1700s, which has some historians have called the century of the greenhouse. But to really set the scene for Dussassure, we have to kind of go back a little bit further to 1550. Now, in Holland, the Dutch. Now, in the 1500s, it was the age of discovery. So ships were going all over the world and coming back to Northern Europe, from Africa and from Indonesia and from Asia and from South America. So all these exotic animals and birds and plants, like orchids, not to mention delicious new foods like bananas and mangoes and coffee. Well, the Dutch went high. We wanna cultivate these things, but it's so cold here. So they started experimenting with glass houses, the first greenhouse. And in fact, double-pane glass as an insulator, that's a Dutch invention from 1550. Well, but you didn't go long ago. Yeah, at least we would know that. This history is extraordinary. And the Dutch did other things that they innovated. They would put little ceramic heaters, little wood stoves that would get warm and then help supplement the heat when it was extremely bitter. But the greenhouse was the beginning of horticulture and the idea of growing all of these exotics and succulents. Okay, so we advanced now to the 1700s to De Cessure. Now, De Cessure had a question. Why is it cooler in the mountains than down on the plains? And he had a hypothesis. He thought, well, the solar energy should be about the same level. So there must be something in the atmosphere that's causing a difference. And he thought the atmosphere in the mountains was more translucent, but he didn't really know. So he did an experiment. He did what any Swiss French scientists would do. He climbed the mountain. So he takes his hot box, which is this double-glazed glass over a hot absorber. Sometimes metal, sometimes just painted black. I was wondering what that was in your diagram. Yeah, I should explain. This is my attempt to try to do a cutaway. And so he put this in a pine box and then surrounded it with cork and then put it into another box. And there's this little thermometer in the center. So he climbs the mountain and he measures that the hot box would get to 190 degrees. Then he measured the temperature in the mountain and it was like 44 degrees Fahrenheit. So the next day he climbs down the mountain, repeats his experiment at the same time a day, and to his astonishment and probably delight, he sees that the temperature in the hot box was not 190 degrees, but the temperature of the surrounding air on the plains in the valley was like 78 degrees. And he said, oh, there it is. The amount of solar energy in the mountains and in the plains is the same, essentially. What's different, he thought what's happening is, is the earth is acting like his hot box, that just as the panes of glass would reflect back the infrared, he felt that the gases near the surface of the earth, the carbon dioxide, the water vapor, that this would act as a heat trapping mechanism. And he was right. So this is kind of the greenhouse effect that we're just gonna say greenhouse effect. Oh, I'm kidding. So imagine the people today sometimes you hear, well, you know, a greenhouse effect, really the jury's out on that. We really don't know if that's, no, no, no, there's no jury. Reem de Sassier, de Sassier, he knows what he's talking about. Okay, so let's move on to the low temperature engine. All right, so this, I'm trying to work my way through your slide. Thank you very much. Okay, so now we're back into the 1850s, 1860s, and there's a contemporary of Machot, and his name was Tellier. Now Tellier was a joint in the engineering world. He turned heat or hot into cold. And it astounded everyone. He designed the first mechanical refrigerator for shipping and famously shipped chilled beef from France to Buenos Aires. But he was world famous. They couldn't believe it. So how did he do it? Well, he studied liquids that would boil at very low temperature, for example, ammonia. Now ammonia will boil at like minus 28 degrees Fahrenheit. Really low temperature, it'll vaporize. So Tellier, he understood that there are problems with running steam engines because it takes so much energy to boil water. It's a lot of energy. In fact, Tellier knew that if you had like a cup of water and you boiled it, it would want to occupy 1,300 cups of volume. So it's an amazing power that you have to push back into the pipes at very high pressure. Now, Tellier, because he was a thermodynamicist and studied these exotic liquids, he said, no, instead of a high temperature, and there's actually something that disaster pointed out is that when he measured higher temperatures, they would irradiate the heat faster. So if you did operate at high temperature, you're losing a lot of heat as well inadvertently. So Tellier said, okay, we're gonna do a low temperature engine. And in modern times, he's the first one to ever do this. And so what he did, instead of the concentrators and tracking the sun, he got two sheets of corrugated iron and riveted it together, the valley and the peak of one another, forming these little channels. That's what I'm trying to draw in that little upper part as a mask. And then he used ammonia as the working fluid. So he put a manifold on the bottom, a manifold on the top. So there's only one inlet and one outlet. And he would feed ammonia into this hot plate collector and it would vaporize. And he reported he could get 40 pounds of pressure. And then he had that run to a simple steam engine and the vapor after it exited the steam engine would have enough pressure to go through some tubing, a coil, through inside a tank of cold water. And he was able as a closed loop to condense it, to glue it off, back into a liquid to be repeated. Now what Tellier did, which is kind of amazing, imagine he's in his garden in a suburb of Paris. And what he did is he would drop into the bottom of his well a diaphragm water pump. Now a diaphragm water pump was a pump invented by the ancient Egyptians. And it basically was like a box with a hinge valve on the outside and a hinge valve on the inside with this kind of diaphragm that would go up and down with this push bull rod that he was running with the steam engine. And so when you push down, it would force air out or the water out through the exit valve and close the end valve because there was pressure there. And then when you pull up on the pull rod, it would close the exit valve and open the inlet valve and allow water to go in. So it's kind of... And so he's standing in his garden, well, how do you use lead? The people would come by and go, yeah, Mr. Tellier, what are you doing? How did you do this? And he thought that his low temperature engines for water pumping, because that was the big thing in that time, Shaman is something the world had been fighting for a long time and we still do much to our chagrin. But he thought this could, in fact, in 1880, he wrote a book called The Peaceful Conquest of Africa with the Sun. He's a man of his age, so conquests might maybe overstated. But he was talking about turning Africa into the red basket of the world. So Tellier was an extraordinary man, got extraordinary results. But suddenly for mysterious reasons, just after 1880, he stopped, went back into refrigerated shipping. Maybe it was very lucrative for him, but it was a mystery why he abandoned solar when he did. But nevertheless, he opened a door that others could walk through. So let's go to Will See and Boyle. Now, this is the next one. Now, Will See and Boyle were amazing. They're two engineers from Illinois. And in the 1880s, 1890s, they wanted to revolutionize the world, to save the world with a commercial solar power plant. Again, for water pumping. Now, Will See and Boyle were very thoughtful. They spent seven years actually studying everything. Macheau was known to them, Erickson was known to them, Tellier was known to them. And when they looked at everything, they thought, well, the problem with the solar concentrators is the glass is heavy, the mirrors are heavy, and the higher the concentration ratio, the more exactly you had to point at the sun. So they had mechanisms and all kinds of balance weights. And they said, ah, this is too tough. We want to go with Tellier. We want to do a low temperature engine. But Will See and Boyle, they didn't want to use ammonia out in the solar field. So they said, okay, we're going to make the first combined cycle. We're going to use water in a hot block that the Sassier taught us about. And so they'd have a pine box lined with tar paper. They only had a depth of like three inches for the water, double-pane glass above it, cork around the whole thing, and another box to support it. And in this next slide, you'll see, I just, I didn't draw the serpentine kind of path that the water took, but in their big solar hot box, they were able to get the water up to actually about boiling. Not super hot, but very hot. And then they answered the question of how do you store solar energy? And they simply said, well, we're going to put a big tank of water, hot water, at the end of our solar collectors, and we're going to insulate it. And so that's how they wanted to store the energy. So what they did is the water would come off their solar field, go into this big tank, and then in the spirit of Tellier, they made a closed loop. This is the combined cycle where you have a completely separate cycle of these pipes that would contain not ammonia, but another low temperature vaporizing fluid of sulfur dioxide. And that evaporated around 14 degrees Fahrenheit. So as long as you don't mix it with water, you're okay. If you mix them, you're going to get really super strong acids, but they successfully kept them all isolated. So out of the hot water tank, they pour the hot water over the pipes that contain the sulfur dioxide. It would vaporize, run their motor, but because they had so much solar hot water in their big tank, they were the first ones to run a solar plant 24 hours a day, continuously with this 15 horsepower motor. So just the solar energy that they collected during the day. Amazing. So Toby, that is amazing. And the amazing thing here is we only got about three and a half minutes left to go. Oh, okay. All right, well, let's jump to the next slide. And I'll just try and summarize. Okay, so Wilson Goyle went to Needles, California in the Mojave Desert, and they built that large power plant. But by 1903, they had some financial difficulties and they had to stop. Like most engineers, they were trying to improve and improve. Okay, so that opened the door to Frank Shillman. And that's what you're looking at now. What Shillman did is he thought, yeah, we want to use a low temperature engine. I get that. But the hot boxes that he was building were still tremendous, but he wanted to keep improving. So he decided to put side reflectors up at nearly 60 degrees on each side. And that gave you a 2X concentration and he got a great performance. And this he did in a suburb in Philadelphia in from 1909, 1906 to 1909, and raised money to then take the whole thing to Egypt. But he was able to pump 3,000 gallons a minute. And he didn't have anywhere to put it. He didn't have a garden as such or a well. So he put it up a big tower up 33 feet and blasted it down into an Egyptator. But people would walk by even in the wintertime in Philadelphia and see this water blasted out of his solar power plant. So Frank Shillman was amazing. Well, Frank Shillman went even further. He said, I want to do the low temperature style, but I don't want ammonia and I don't want sulfur dioxide. I don't want anything. I want to use water. But he didn't like the performance he was getting. So he said, I'm going to invent a new steam engine, which is a low-temperature, low-pressure steam engine. What? And so what he did just as water boils up in a mountain at a lower temperature, he actually made a closed loop in his water pipe and then evacuated all the air out of the pipe and sealed it up and tricked the water into thinking it was at a high altitude. And so when he finally went to Egypt in that next slide, just briefly he improved the optics to do this parabolic trough concentrator that would direct the sunlight at the bottom of the hotbox, in this case now just a pipe. And he was able to pump at, by 1913, 6,000 gallons a minute at a plantation that grew cotton in Egypt. And everyone in the world just was blown away. That is industrial sun. Now, unfortunately, World War I came along and it kind of disrupted everything. He had to go back to America and unfortunately he passed away before the war ended. So we never got a chance to see him really run with it. But so that gets us to 1913 and I realized we're probably out of time now. Yeah, 51 seconds, so that's really fast. Okay, well, so here we have this extraordinary path, this golden spread of technology where from the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans using architecture to use solar energy, we now get into the 1800s where these inventors are using machines to actually power physical work that was just amazing to everyone. And this is before the 20th century, as far as macho. So we didn't know about the electrical age or the petroleum age. This was still unknown. And there was a great hope that the world would be solar powered leading to the end of poverty and a much more sustainable and peaceful world. So I say we should be inspired by these guys. I certainly am. Well, I'm inspired by them and I'm very inspired by your stories. And all the great information you have, Toby, that's really great. Well, we're gonna have to leave it there guys. Once again, we're out of time. I know Toby still has a lot of new information to tell us but we just don't have the time to do it. So we've been talking to Toby Kincaid about the fascinating history of solar energy. I'm sure everybody's finding this fascinating like I am. And once again, our ancestors were pretty smart people and it's amazing to learn what they did to harness the solar industrial solar energy. Well, thanks for educating us, Toby. Bye. My pleasure. So hello, everyone. And thanks to our viewers for tuning in. I bet you are. We'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii, the state of clean energy.