Senator JOHNSTON. But a good part of that is wood chips and hydro. Miss FITZPATRICK. Yes; a good part of it is wood, and a good part of it is hydropower, but a growing share is the other renewable sources.

Senator JOHNSTON. Sun energy, as I would call it, solar properly defined meaning something really coming rather directly from the Sun, is a minuscule amount right now, isn't it?

Miss FITZPATRICK. Right now, the nonhydropower, which is really solar energy, since it takes the Sun to evaporate the waterSenator JOHNSTON. Gasoline is too.

Miss FITZPATRICK. That is true.

I remember, Dr. Trivelpiece claiming last year that it was all really fusion power, which I suppose is correct. [Laughter.]

At any rate, the nonhydropower generating capacity now, renewable generating capacity in the United States, is about 1 percent of our total electric generating capacity. It is about 6,800 megawatts.

Senator JOHNSTON. Most of that is wood chips?

Miss FITZPATRICK. A large share of it is wood chips. Less than half of it, about 3,000 megawatts, is wood chips, about 1,500 megawatts is geothermal, and about 1,200 is wind, and the rest is scattered through solar thermal, and the others.

There are 2,500 megawatts currently under construction, and these systems have fairly short lead times, so that I would expect that to come on line in about a year. The projections are that these systems are going to continue to grow. I think, in large part, the rate that they grow will be dependent upon the conventional fuels cost and how attractive these systems can be made to be, both technically, from a reliability standpoint, and from an economic standpoint.

Senator JOHNSTON. Frankly, we overhyped solar energy in this country a few years ago. Jimmy Carter said we are going to have 20 percent solar by the year 2000, and suggested, by definitional sleight of hand, that it was going to be photovoltaics and that sort of thing, cheap energy from the Sun. Everyone tried to celebrate that and finally realized that that wasn't so.

Now, I think we may be overcompensating in the other direction now, and that is why I am anxious to find out the latest breakthroughs. If photovoltaic is competitive, then it absolutely wipes out other sources, at least in the sunny climates.

Is that a real possibility? Do you see an all across the Southwest, in the 21st century, using photovoltaics or some sort of Sun energy virtually exclusively?

Miss FITZPATRICK. I wouldn't say, "virtually exclusively," Mr. Chairman. I think your point is very well taken that there was a lot of hype and a lot of things that were said in great hope before anyone had had a chance to take a very careful look at the technical challenges and the economic realities.

In a certain sense, the industry suffers today from a credibility gap because so many promises were made, and people bought systems that turned out not to work very well because nobody had done his homework on it very carefully. That is a hump that industry now has to get over by producing a quality product and serving the customer.

The prospects of going exclusively solar, I think, will be driven in large part by economics. There is no need for us to be exclusively solar, we have other options. If solar turns out, in certain instances, in certain areas, for certain applications, to be the technically and economically preferable choice, then we ought to be sure that we have done the research to make it available.

Senator JOHNSTON. What is the value of photovoltaic cell sales in dollars each year?

Miss FITZPATRICK. Worldwide, I think I have those figures. The worldwide total in 1987 was 28.6 megawatts.

Senator JOHNSTON. In terms of dollars, what would that be?

Miss FITZPATRICK. I think that it is about $200 million a year, just in cells themselves. That is not for anything else in the system, it is just for cells.

Senator JOHNSTON. Is this a sufficient amount of spending to develop photovoltaics? I see you have a $24.2 million budget here; is that enough?

Miss FITZPATRICK. I think that it is enough. It is tight, but I think it is sufficient to achieve our program goals. Industry spending is also going up in the United States, that is running about $50 million a year.

Our work is done in large part in collaboration with industry. We have several projects with the leading photovoltaic manufacturers in the United States, which are running on 50-percent cost shares. Those have been quite successful.

Senator JOHNSTON. On the one hand, I hear that there is the possibility of these huge breakthroughs, figures that we thought were unattainable a few years ago, and that really look very promising. Yet I see a relatively small budget compared to the money we used to spend. We used to spend in the hundreds of million of dollars for photovoltaics.

Miss FITZPATRICK. Yes, sir.

Senator JOHNSTON. I suspect we spent, counting tax credits, billions, I guess, on solar energy in this country, not most of that on photovoltaics, but at least it makes me wonder whether or not that is enough.

Miss FITZPATRICK. I think you are right. We did a count about 2 years ago, and I think we came up with something like $5 billion in outlays plus credits for renewable energy.

WIND ENERGY RESEARCH

Senator JOHNSTON. What are you doing in wind energy research?

Miss FITZPATRICK. In wind energy, we are concentrating on structural mechanics of the wind turbines themselves. This has turned out to be one of the serious problems with wind turbines. After a year, or 2 years, or 3 years, maybe a little more, in operation, the turbine blade undergoes structural fatigue and can, in fact, break. This has been a problem with virtually all wind turbines.

Senator JOHNSTON. I fly between San Francisco and Yosemite, over those wind farms-how much has been invested out there, how many tens of millions?

Miss FITZPATRICK. I couldn't tell you, but it has a lot of wind turbines, though, thousands of them.

Senator JOHNSTON. But most of them are not turning, why is that? Miss FITZPATRICK. If you go over on a summer afternoon, they are turning.

Senator JOHNSTON. Say that again?

Miss FITZPATRICK. If you fly over on a summer afternoon, they are turning. The newer turbines on the well-managed wind farms have an availability of over 95 percent.

Senator JOHNSTON. I am usually on summer morning. They turn only in the afternoon?

Miss FITZPATRICK. They are designed to turn as summer peaking power. That is their main function, to supply the utilities with summer peaking power. They are placed on that site because, typically, the winds do rise in midday in the summertime and flow from the coast over that mountain pass into the desert to the east. Senator JOHNSTON. They are still working? Miss FITZPATRICK. Yes; they work.

Senator JOHNSTON. They just don't pay off?

Miss FITZPATRICK. No; they are paying off. Those are going concerns now, and that technology is attracting a good deal of private invest

ment.

OCEAN ENERGY SYSTEM RESEARCH

Senator JOHNSTON. Ocean energy, is that the old OTEC?

Miss FITZPATRICK. Yes, sir.

Senator JOHNSTON. But they didn't build the OTEC. They built miniOTEC, was it?

Miss FITZPATRICK. We built a very small shipboard, barge OTEC plant.

Senator JOHNSTON. Is it still operating?

Miss FITZPATRICK. No; it was dismantled several years ago. We have, at the Seacoast Test Facility in Hawaii, a new cold water pipe, and we are doing heat exchanger and turbine compressor experiments. Our eventual goal is to operate a 165-kilowatt OTEC system.

Senator JOHNSTON. The last time I did a fix on that, that looked like an absolute candidate for noneconomically passing muster. Isn't that so? Miss FITZPATRICK. Mr. Chairman, if you look at our budget request, you will see that we don't ask very much for it. I have to admit, that from the United States point of view, for solving our energy needs, OTEC is not at the top of our priority list.

Senator JOHNSTON. Why $3.1 million?

Miss FITZPATRICK. Because there are a number of things that can be done that we would need for an OTEC system, such as heat exchangers, low-pressure compressors, and high-volume pumps, that would be useful in other applications, especially the heat exchangers.

There is also a good possibility that the technologies developed, that would be useful in an OTEC system, would also be very useful for a bottoming cycle, that is, taking warm waste streams from conventional powerplants, for example, and extracting the energy that we are now throwing away into rivers, for example, in many cases.

If we had the ability to make use of fairly low temperature waste streams, we could, in fact, have a large energy gain. This would be useful in other applications than ocean thermal.

Ocean thermal does have the possibility of being attractive for tropical, and especially island applications, if you could economically build a plant, say, in the 5-megawatt range.

Senator JOHNSTON. But to build a plant in the 5-megawatt range, it would be enormously expensive. You would have to develop this enormously expensive technology, which you could use only two or three places in the world-Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippine Trench—or something which would produce but 5 megawatts and that is about all you would need. I have never understood it, but it is not much money, as you point out.

SOLAR ENERGY RESEARCH INSTITUTE FACILITY

Why do we need to build a new building for SERI? When solar energy has been going down and down, why do we need to build a 100,000-square-foot building in a time of budget stringency?

Miss FITZPATRICK. The reason is that most of the laboratory facilities at SERI are in what is really a converted office building. The building was not put up as a laboratory, and it has had to be refitted with the equipment and systems that are necessary for a laboratory.

We are at this point stretching the bounds of what can be effectively and safely done. For example, there are no special facilities to handle toxic materials, either to store them or to use them. We need to have safer ventilation systems and evacuation hoods. We can't now isolate the laboratory's air supply and exhaust.

We have even had instances where we have had to remove the external wall of a building in order to bring equipment in. The building was not designed with the elevator and hallway passages for moving laboratory equipment.

We have reached the point where the facilities that are there are not adequate. They are not safe for doing the work that we know is going to have to be done in our future solar research. We think that a new building is justified, even at the relatively reduced levels of funding that we are proposing.

Senator JOHNSTON. I would have to be persuaded that we have the money to be able to do that.

SUPERCONDUCTING SUPER COLLIDER

Dr. Decker, you have a ramp up from $25 million to $363 million for 1989 for the SSC. Can you do ramp up that fast in 1 year?

Dr. DECKER. I believe that we do have a reasonable plan for doing that, and I think that it is what it really takes to keep the project on the schedule that we have laid out. There is a ramp up in the research and development from $25 to $64 million that will be used to continue research and development on the magnets and also to start doing some research and development on the detectors. The capital equipment request of $16 million also really supports the research and development

program and will provide for vesting and analysis of magnets and other components and systems.

In the construction area, mostly we are talking about doing detailed engineering design for technical systems and conventional systems. To date, what we have are conceptual designs, and we need now to move to detailed design.

We also have a number of long-lead procurement items that we need to acquire, things like injector technical components, which are early critical path items. We also have some other long-lead procurement items such as magnet tooling, superconducting materials, magnet steel, and so forth.

Senator JOHNSTON. I just can't imagine being able to ramp up that much. You don't have an EIS, and that is going to delay this project a great deal. We don't know how it is going to be managed and who is going to manage it. We have thought about the need to put out an RFP for a management contract. I don't know whether you need that.

I know you are having problems with your magnets. They don't quench. Does it mean that the magnetic field is not right, not up to power, or something?

Dr. DECKER. Let me say a few words about the magnet development program.

We have, of course, built the Tevatron at Fermilab using superconducting magnets, and we have a fair experience base from that machine. We set out to improve the magnet design over what we did use at Fermilab to try to keep the costs of the SSC down.

We set out to do things like improve the current carrying capability of the wire by 50 percent, to increase the field strength of the magnet by 50 percent, to reduce the heat loss by a factor of six. We have been able to achieve most of those goals. We have, in fact, achieved all of them in the short magnets that we have built, the 1-meter magnets and the 4-meter magnets.

With the full length magnets, which are 16.5 meters, we have met almost all of those design criteria. We have had some problems with what is called training. That has been the most significant difficulty that we have had. It is not a major problem, it is a mechanical problem, or at least that is what causes it. We have several possible solutions for fixing that, and I think that we will, in fact, have that problem fixed very soon.

Senator JOHNSTON. What is the quenching problem?

Dr. DECKER. The quenching problem, I think, is one and the same as this training problem. When you start ramping the current up on a new magnet, it will get up to a certain value, and then it will quench. Then you ramp it up again, and it usually goes up to a higher value, and it may quench again until you get up to the full-field capability of the magnet.

Senator JOHNSTON. None have worked to specification, though, have they?

Dr. DECKER. They have worked to the field specification. Yes, they have reached field specifications, it is just that training is not as good as

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