A Ray of Hope : City Takes a Clue From ‘Solar Motor’ to Ensure That It Will Have Power for the Next Century

PASADENA —  A chapter of Pasadena-area history is repeating itself.

The solar motor is coming back a century after it made its original brief appearance in the west San Gabriel Valley.

The setting then was pure California: a roadside attraction in South Pasadena that featured ostriches. Their improbable co-attraction was a “solar engine,” an honest-to-gosh 15-horsepower steam rig powered by the sun, which pumped a thousand gallons a minute to irrigate the ranch that harbored the birds.

The device was invented in 1898 by an Englishman, Aubrey Eneas. He was drawn to this area for its first practical application because a few years previously, a roof-mounted appliance for home water heating had become popular in Pasadena.

“Everybody had one,” enthused the Pasadena Daily Evening Star by 1899. The solar devices that proliferated in that era looked something like an automobile radiator and heated only about the same amount of water. The rig at the ostrich farm--an “industrial-strength” version--was a one-of-a-kind until this year.

Conner Everts, a city of Pasadena Water and Power Department consultant, said a modern reincarnation of the Eneas solar motor has been built by a friend of his, Tom Miller, on a hillside in Ojai.

Like the original South Pasadena model, Miller’s device in Ojai is startlingly evocative of a TV satellite dish. As Everts explains, the sun’s hot rays are gathered by the shiny Mylar panels of the dish and focused on a hollow central rod to boil the water as it passes through.

Similarly, in a TV dish--also usually made of plastic--the central rod gathers broadcast signals radiated from a satellite. “Miller’s dish gives you steam. Radio Shack’s gives you sitcoms,” Everts quipped.

Everts’ interest in the Ojai experiment is not just idle curiosity. Soon, the same technology will power a generator known as Solar Two in Barstow that will begin providing Pasadena with electricity by 1995.

The two generators work on exactly the same principles, Everts said.

“But instead of boiling water to power a steam engine or turbine like Tom’s version, the city’s installation in Barstow heats salt to the melting point.” The purpose of the molten mass of salt is to fill a storage tank that serves, day and night, to keep water boiling to run a modern turbine generator.

George Morrow, assistant general manager in charge of utility resource planning for the Pasadena Water and Power Department, said the Barstow installation consists of a 300-foot tower surrounded by “heliostats,” essentially a multitude of curved solar collectors somewhat like the Eneas-Miller devices.

Solar Two will provide more than 20 megawatts of electricity, of which Pasadena’s share will be half, or 10,000 kilowatts, enough to power 2,500 homes for as long as the project runs.

Its cost estimate is $39 million. Miller’s, which powers an engine on one farm, cost $3,500. Neither uses any fuel other than sunlight. Neither produces pollution.

Those are two of the reasons why local authorities have rediscovered the sun as a municipal energy source. The others include a U.S. Department of Energy commitment for half the cost of Solar Two, a continuing per-kilowatt energy cost comparable to the city’s ongoing cost for gas and coal, and a construction time much faster than conventional generating facilities--decades faster and millions cheaper than a nuclear plant, for instance.

“It’s more expensive to build (than a gas or coal plant but) cheaper to run,” Morrow said. “And it’s experimental, but the city wouldn’t OK any involvement until we saw the figures that said it would be competitive.”

Joining Pasadena in Solar Two are the Los Angeles DWP, Southern California Edison and utilities in Northern California, Arizona and Idaho.

Pasadena’s leadership in innovative energy programs, including those based on rediscovered technology, garnered an award for the city this year. The California Municipal Utilities Assn. Resource Conservation Award, initiated this year, was conferred on the Crown City.

In the words of George Burns as he neared his 90th birthday, “Sometimes you’re so old, you’re new.”