Solar Campus

If you are driving south along Highway 61 from Blytheville, you can catch in the corner of my eye. Today it is just looks like some fantasy written birdbaths in a field, but when they were new, these were parabolic part of the world's largest photovoltaic system, and they helped warmth and flow of the Mississippi County Community College. These six reflectors and the framework for the original prototype solar system have been issued on the grounds of the university obtained. 264 more reflectors and their support structures were sold as scrap to local merchants about five years ago.

So, how is it that this community college come to play in this rural area close to the air and space industry to host this cutting edge technological experiment? And in the same breath, we ask now that solar electric production is always economically practical, why it was discarded built here, where it was right in the physical plant design?

In 1974 the voters of Mississippi County in northeast Arkansas elected three mill tax for the construction of a campus, so that local children had a cost higher education close to coming home. In August 1975, classes began for 800 students in the old Sudbury Primary School. In 1976, the Board bought 80 acres to build on which the new campus.

In 1976 Jimmy Carter elected president. The Arabs had cut off our oil supply. Energy prices rose. Petrol was in short supply. The government decided to experimental alternative energy projects through the Energy Resource Development Administration (ERDA) to finance. Arkansas' national politicians approached college President Dr. Harry Smith with the idea of conversion to MCCC pilot energy project. Not only is the quest for energy independence and the ecologically enlightened patriotic thing to do, but always a big federal project in your district made for good entertainment come election time. Smith was all for it. He hoped that accelerate this high-tech project would his school accreditation process. He expects that international attention would be drawn from this project good for the region. He expects that solar technology courses attended the experiment would make his college a recruiting station for the basic high-tech companies and the financial support could be collected from the companies. You could not swing a cat without getting fur all about synergy.

In February 1977, announced Senator John McClellan, who had been lobbying for the project were that college officials with ERDA, who has agreed to produce a feasibility study for a solar generator of 500 kilowatts would fund had to meet. The Little Rock architectural firm Cromwell, Neyland, Truemper, Levy and Gatchell would draft the administrative and academic buildings. Honeywell will design the heat exchange and energy components. Another group called the Total Energy Applications / Management (TEAM) would also be involved. TEAM was a Washington-and-Little-Rock-consulting firm that coordinated the project, accepted and reviewed bids, deals with the authorities and so on.

At the end of April announced that Vice President Mondale would go ERDA put up $ 5.8 million to 2.5 million dollars in the local money. The local money would go to the campus. The federal government would be money for solar energy functions. President Smith was surprised at the size of the grant. They had asked for $ 4.5M. He was further surprised that the Carter administration envisaged to be an important showcase and testing ground for solar energy technologies.

Something has happened I have not yet figured out. Somewhere between July and August of 1977 increased the ERDA grant money $ 5.8 million to $ 6.3M. The only reason why I was in the newspapers was that delays due to contractors inability within the budget range, but since the extra money came before the first betting round, I'm not sure that the real reason.

After funds were budgeting. If you went to a bank to the money, get something to build on your own, you would first things cost and then ask for the money to cover it. But sometimes government procedures serve motives other than those specified, especially if the administration on how to proactively respond to a crisis would be perceived. In this case, distributing President Carter to make some money as he did see something about the Arab oil embargo, was so the money and the news stories first and details to follow.

From the perspective of the locals, the most important of the follow-on details, the distribution of millions. It is easy to build the cost of building a two-room house, because each year thousands are estimated. You can find one on a plan similar to its built and almost certainly will be, the price in the ballpark and the water and heat and AC and power everything is going to work as advertised. But this stuff was all new solar energy. Although some of the technology was open source, most of the components had never been combined or applied on this scale. For example, General Engineering Laboratory (GEL) from Durham, NC was to store energy in the form of iron redox batteries with a gel electrolyte medium design. I called Bill at Stellar Ball Sun Solar Energy Shop in Little Rock. (One could him as the man who recall the water wheel converted to Dogpatch.) I asked him what an iron redox batttery is and why we want one and why I could not find anyone to sell them on the web. I could only find very few technical documentation and references. Apparently they are not profitable.

Iron redox batteries are a type of hard holy grail advocates of green energy. In discussions on the subject, the words "in theory" come a lot. The technology is very promising in theory. The components are not at all exotic, toxic, in theory, gelatin, water, iron, coal. They are infinitely rechargeable and can be fired without any damage, again in theory.

Lead-acid batteries, such as your car battery wears out after so many thousands of discharges and recharges. As dissolved ions go back and forth from the anode to cathode and back again, a few of them combine with other ions or dissolved oxygen and precipitate out of solution. After a few years, all the metal in the plates in the battery at the end as sludge at the bottom of the battery compartment. Iron redox (reduction / oxidation) batteries, replacing electrons riding gases dissolved in solution and not as dissolved mineral ions, so that the electrodes disintegrate into mud. So in theory can unload an iron-redox battery and charged forever. It does not wear out with normal use. The technique is very well known because it was one of the earliest designs battery and sometimes used to power telegraphs and railway signals in the last century. Another advantage of iron redox batteries is safety. No lead. No acid. Think you have, how much lead and acid you'd have to hand, to save the power of a 500-kilowatt transmitter. Then think of the place as packed with college students and you can see the problems with conventional batteries ask.

The flip side of the iron-redox battery is that a little power you have to store a large horn battery use. An iron redox battery strong enough to fit your car might not start in your car. Of course, if you store energy for an immobile system and you have plenty of room basement, size and weight are not such a problem.

All the excitement of iron redox batteries was made controversial when it became clear that the project get under Plan B, not plan A.

The original proposal by ERDA, the feasibility of guys in Oak Ridge was for an array that would generate 500 kilowatts at noon on a clear day. The feasibility of guys in Oak Ridge ERDA informed that this proposal was too optimistic for the existing technology, and presents two sets of modest goals. A plan proposed a plant energy requirements to 240 usable (that is AFTER losing by circuit and converting direct current to alternating current) kilowatts at peak solar conversion of 2-megawatt-hours of storage accompanies. A rough translation: your production facility can produce one fourth megawatts at noon on a sunny day and you can save about ten hours worth of juice in your batteries.

could 1) the 240 kilowatts, before being measured, rather than after, the loss of inversion and circuits: Plan B was as Plan A with the following changes. Sorting the way companies report EBITDA as if they were real incomes. And 2) instead of 10 hours worth of battery current product information, a stripped-battery system would be large enough to allow for smoothing of the fluctuations in energy through things like passing clouds. So there was some incentive to Plan B, known officially as the move "Option II". The technical goals were easier to achieve, and hinted Mr. Ahearn of TEAM can be that if all bids were over budget, ERDA could come up with some more money.

The project leaders were scrap Plan A and Plan B to shift if and only if none of the contractor submitted a bid lower than the amount budgeted for the construction of the plant.

Honeywell developed a prototype solar panel and shipped it to Blytheville a little under $ 700,000. On the right is a picture of the remains exactly where it was originally installed as a teaching tool. This is the way of the world with the latest technology. One day you're worth two-thirds of a million dollars. In no time you are a parrot perch. Honeywell estimated price of the entire power plant at $ 1.9m. The items in the budget was set at $ 1,491,501 and alternative proposals were sought.

In August 1978 three tenders were submitted. All shoot out three of a mile. The lowest was $ 3.6M. The cost had to be cut, and that meant going to Option II specifications and that meant no iron redox batteries. Some of the other austerity measures have ultimately contributed to the project early end. Firstly, the prototype of a large platter unit, the solar cells pointed in the direction of the flat sunlight. The cells were brand new technology at the time and had to be done manually. They were the single most expensive line items. It has been argued that, if you could thirty times the sunlight on a cell it was similar to that put as much sunlight to thirty individual cells. Therefore, the prototype is flat and installed the devices have finally this parabolic mirror. Solar cells, 62,000 of them were aligned in two rows above the mirror faces down at the reflectors, rather than up in the sun.

The original design called for two triangular supports, one at each end of each 20-foot section. The design you see above places a single vertical I-beams every 20 feet in a three-part series. The structure that holds the gear out of the ground requires less than half of the originally specified materials. If you have 270 sections, adding that up. The original design called for each section, its own automatic tracking mechanism. To save money sections were combined, so that an engine and a set of ganged sensors would orient six reflectors. A dollar here is a dollar.


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