To prove it he graduated 53rd from Anapolis, became a qualified as Captain and then for more a challange, went into the fledgling Nave Nuclear power program, culminating as lead for the first team to decom a melted down reactor, which includeded being lowered into it to help take it apart a minute at a time. Then he went on to take a nearly bankrupt family farm and turn it into a profitable business.
So, what went wrong for SERI?
Let’s take a trip back in time…………..
Oil producers created OPEC as a vehicle to redress via price fixing and limiting supply what was perceived as an unfair situation, demand pricing and international politics. However, I always follow the money to learn the truth, and as you know, for most of it’s life, OPEC has been all about the money.
Luckily for OPEC, rumor has it a number one son of an OPEC minister was just finishing up a quality English Education. When he got back home, he filled pops in on the facts of life. Price fixing always backfires, Western Countries that were addicted to oil also had had a huge supply of engineers and inventors who were more than capable of providing alternatives to oil, even cheap oil.
OPEC cut back it’s demands, political and economic.
The oil flowed.
For most of the intervening decades a barrel of crude oil was cheaper a barrel of Coke-A-Cola.
Every effort to break dependence on oil was abandoned, but one (Brazil, who realized if it wanted to develop, modernize, it couldn’t fork out much of it’s GDP for oil – and who are world leaders now in sustainable energy – with synergy being their key to success).
SERI was one of the efforts that was cut, shuttered before ground was even broken for it’s labs.
It had been outsourcing research, into wind, photovoltaic, ground source heat pumps, solar ponds, super insulation, bio – mass, bio – digestion, geo – thermal, solar thermal….. which was boxed up, tossed into a few buildings at an office park, not even micro filmed, indexed and made available for inter – library lending, and thus was born a very much unfunded NREL, National Renewable Energy Labs.
Though, after energy again become an issue, around turn of the millennium, NREL was actually massively expanded, it built labs at the old SERI site, and nearly reached a billion dollar a year budget, before, the recession hit, oil prices collapsed, the oil flowed free, and the NREL’s budget was cut in half. Nothing like not learning from history eh?
Here are some of the construction drawings for the wing of the building that was eventually built, a quarter of what was planned – a mountain spanning passive energy building, complete with dry wash / stream right through the middle, with the mesa above covered with the worlds largest solar pond, wind generators, and PV arrays for it’s energy needs (which I’ll penciled in over the site photos above some day).
