Stirling Energy's technology isn't the only thermoelectric approach, but so far the others can't match its efficiency. In any case, the real competition to any renewable energy source is not other new technologies but conventional power generation. And the energy industry is notoriously resistant to change. "This is not a go-fast industry, like telecommunications or computers," says Eckhart. Unless regulation or customer preferences force utilities to go whole hog into renewable energy, Slawson will have to get his dishes to produce energy reliably at pennies per kilowatt. That means finding ways to manufacture the systems more cheaply and get more electricity out of each dish.
The company is working furiously on both goals in facilities set up in the desert bungalows outside Albuquerque. Slawson employs some 30 people, many from the teams that first developed the technology, and they are engaged in an endless game of tweaking. The original prototype dish and engine would have cost $300,000 each to manufacture in quantity. That would have led to a $6 billion price tag for setting up the 20,000 dishes required to put out the 500 megawatts of a typical generating station, about enough to light a medium-size city.
To slash costs, the engineers replaced Boeing's airplane-style, customized, sheet-metal-and-rivets approach to the dish frame with a mass-producible, bolted, rolled-steel design. A custom heat exchanger was replaced with off-the-shelf racecar radiators, and the 82 three- by four-foot mirrors that cover each dish's surface, which originally cost hundreds of dollars apiece, are now producible for less than $30 each by the same process used to create makeup compacts. Slawson says he can build a dish system for about $25,000 -- bringing the total price of a 500-megawatt installation to about $600 million, about the same as a conventional generating station. The bottom line: Slawson claims he's already capable of turning out electricity at less than eight cents per kilowatt, making it competitive with a gas-fired plant. "I don't want to say how much less than eight cents it costs me because I don't want to have to sell it too cheaply," he says. "Just cheaply enough to win contracts."
Slawson says he's close to signing a contract for a 500-megawatt solar farm with a major California utility (which he declined to identify); another utility has placed Stirling on a short list for a second 500-megawatt farm. In early 2007, he plans to manufacture 300 dishes a month; he'll bump that up to 1,000 a month by 2009. Unlike a conventional power station, which doesn't produce any juice until it's completed, a solar farm can in theory begin financing itself long before the last dish is up. "We can generate revenue as soon as we start putting dishes in," says Slawson. By 2010, he predicts, Stirling Energy will be pulling in $300 million a year.
That's a pretty bold business plan for a fellow who started out flipping burgers at a Portland Bun 'N Burger he bought with a friend in 1971, shortly after college. Slawson sold the restaurant after a few years and became a massage therapist; by 1978 his practice had become an extensive alternative health care facility that eventually employed 70 professionals. In 1981 he acquired a small alternative health care school and built it into one of the largest such schools in the country -- the East-West College of the Healing Arts. Then came the move to downtown Portland in 1989 and the awakening of his solar consciousness.
Following a stint living in Maui, Slawson returned to Portland. In 1996, he learned that Southern California Edison had been cutting back on R&D and was looking for a buyer for the solar dish technology. The price tag, Slawson says, was "hundreds of thousands of dollars." Slawson raised the money from family, friends, and various well-heeled green contacts he had made over the years -- there's overlap between the massage-homeopathy crowd and clean-air enthusiasts -- and founded Stirling Energy Systems in Phoenix, the unofficial capital of the desert Southwest. By February of 1996, Slawson was in the solar energy business.
His scrappy, New Age background may turn out to be an important strength. The Renewable Energy Council's Eckhart says that when it comes to new sources of power, utilities aren't concerned just with kilowatt pricing -- they also want to be sure the company that's providing it will survive to make sure the juice keeps flowing. In the end, he says, it may be Slawson's unwavering, decadelong commitment that clinches the sale. If Stirling Energy can parlay that passion into a big utility sale, Eckhart adds, other utilities are likely to follow "as a herd." If that happens, says Slawson, he expects buyout offers to come flying in from utilities, oil companies, and other big players. But he's not interested in selling. His goal is to go public and partner with established giants on some really, really big solar farms planted on sun-scorched land that now mostly goes to waste. "If we can cover 1% of the world's deserts," he says, "we can produce 100% of the world's energy needs."
