“It’s a big event anytime the sun comes out, so we bring everything up,” says Paul Collard dryly, tipping his head toward makeshift wooden tables covered with wires, monitors, and a nine-inch-square plastic lens mounted on a stand. “By the time we get it all set up, the sun’s gone.” But not today. A faint acrid smell wafts across the roof, and Collard springs to tip the lens so the intense point of light it’s creating hits metal instead of a smoking spot of plywood.
He set up the business with the help of his wife–Rebecca Janowitz, a lawyer who’s now the company’s president–in a business-incubator building run by the Neighborhood Institute, partly because he wanted to be able to provide a few jobs on the south side. “We have a commitment to this area. Robotics as a group migrated out of the city, but we’re going to try to make every effort we can to stay.” He now employs three people full-time: Bob Hoffmann, a design engineer, and Michael Anderson and Slater Lewis, skilled assemblers. Collard also knew the building was eligible to be a state demonstration site and hoped to set up an array of modules that would tie into the Com Ed grid, but Illinois’ financial crisis ended that plan.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Each module produces 65 watts on a sunny day, or 0.23 kilowatt-hours on an average day in Chicago. (The city gets full sun only three and a half hours a day on a yearly average–the best spots in the world get only five to six, and a few odd ones get seven.) The typical American household uses 24 kilowatt-hours a day, so it would take a very large array of modules to supply a home here with all of its power, as well as a large storage system, which would still consist of cumbersome lead-acid batteries. And the modules aren’t cheap; a four-module array and tracker costs $2,175, though the price per module drops as you buy more. Collard calculates that the cost of power using his modules–20 cents per kilowatt-hour, assuming the modules and tracker work fine for 30 years–would still be double what Com Ed now charges. Still, ten years ago the cost of photovoltaic power was $1.50 per kilowatt-hour.
American manufacturers now have 30 percent of world sales, though in 1980 they had 80 percent of the world’s tiny but metamorphosing market. But that lead was undercut when the Reagan administration slashed R & D programs, including those that would have commercialized systems and promoted exports. The peak funding year for photovoltaics was 1981, when it received $150 million; the ’92 budget is $51 million. By 1987 the U.S. held only 35 percent of the world’s market, and the Japanese had 40. The next year both Japan and Germany spent more than the U.S. on R & D.
