High Tech Takes New Course in Solar Energy Research
Monday, October 16, 2006

By Senior Chief Mass Communications Specialist Jacqueline S. Kiel

It just makes good business sense. Why pay for something you’re not using? That’s the way the Army is thinking, and it’s taking a few Naval Postgraduate School faculty and students to assist in the endeavor.

It all started with some initiative on the part of an NPS instructor, a small company and four thesis projects.

Calling Atira Tech a small company is a bit of an understatement. Born in Bulgaria, but now a proud naturalized American citizen, engineer Stefan Matan started Atira Tech by working out of his garage with an idea and a soldering iron in his hand.

The person spearheading the project here at NPS is Ron Tudor, a lawyer and a lecturer in the School of Business and Public Policy (GSBPP). According to Tudor, the perspective of this type of project is focused on the small micro business, not by giving them money, but by giving them knowledge and the opportunity to grow and to develop products that would be useful to DoD.

The new technology is a power extraction technology that lowers the resistance of electrons to leave the outer valance shell of atoms in the solar panels, thus easing the flow of energy. The difference in power available from a regular solar panel and one that includes the Atira Tech circuit is amazing. Simply put, the circuit increases efficiency. The Atira technology has other advantages, according to Tudor. "To convert direct current (DC) into alternating current (AC) usually results in a power loss of about 40 to 50 percent, in other words wasted power," Tudor explained. "Atira’s inverter converts DC to AC with only a 10 percent loss making it much more efficient."

While the new technology makes good business sense, there are much larger ramifications. This technology could improve field situations for the Army, right down to the individual soldier. That is one of the goals, but of course, it’s still in the research phase.

Tudor found out about the project through a fellow lawyer, was fascinated by it and ran a proposal to take it to the next level via the NPS business school. He was influenced by Lt. Gen. John R. Vines who had actually received a couple of prototypes while in Afghanistan as the task force commander. Vines, Commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, while initial set ups were going on, contacted Tudor and let him know how serious the Army was about the technology.

"I went ahead and put together a proposal on what we would look at and what we would do," Tudor said. "I routed it through the dean of the business school, then Danielle Kuska, and Leonard Ferrari, then dean of research, and they signed off on it. I forwarded this to General Vines and it came back signed."

Tudor also has the support of current GSBPP Dean Robert Beck. "I am very proud to see this kind of ground-breaking research that Ron is doing," Beck stated. "His work is a classic example of how our cutting edge research is relevant to achieving our mission and makes our business and public policy school a leader in developing new knowledge."

Tudor took a hold of the project and ran with it. "The first thing I did was go to the Army Soldiers Systems Center and had them take a look at it," he explained. "I started students off doing thesis projects."

The first two dealt with the economic benefit of changing out disposable batteries with rechargeable batteries, according to Tudor. The difference between the two theses was unit size. "We did it from the brigade-sized organization all the way down to the individual soldier," Tudor explained. "It literally turns out to be millions of dollars saved for a single brigade. It is millions of dollars a year getting rid of the disposable batteries and using rechargeables."

The third thesis answered the question of what it would take to power up the entire city of Baghdad, with a focus on houses, schools, police stations and hospitals. "This becomes an effects-based operation," Tudor explained. "What is the psychological impact of an operation such as this? Students did the calculations to figure out how much it would cost to power up all of Baghdad. It turned out to be six and a half billion dollars.

"Compare that with how much is being spent on a daily basis for operations," Tudor exclaimed.

The final thesis focused on Ft. Bliss. "The fourth thesis looked at how much energy is available at Ft. Bliss," Tudor explained. "It covered the economic analysis for what would it take to power up Ft. Bliss, what would the cost be as we started into an initial pilot plant, and it still turns out that your fossil fuels are probably cheaper than solar energy, even with the technology we’ve got, but it’s competing with nuclear energy. With what we’re doing now, I would say we would reach parity with grid power and that’s a big statement."

The first phase of the Fort Bliss project is scheduled to begin Oct. 17 and is expected to last several months. It will generate a total of 1.5 megawatts of power. "Once we run this first phase and we pull the power out of that, we want the data for about six months before we start moving into Phase Two," Tudor said.

Phase Two will begin around fall of 2007 and generate 20 megawatts of power. Tudor said that is more energy than the largest solar energy installation in the world, which is a plant in Germany that currently generates 12 megawatts.

The plan for Phase Three is to generate 40 megawatts in the fall of 2008 and by the fall of 2009 Phase Four would kick in with a whopping Gigawatt of power.

The Ft. Bliss project will be run just like the Apollo program, according to Tudor. "We’re not running forward on a pure economic model out there," he stated. "We’re taking a scientific approach to go out and soundly vet this technology and to prove the technology and to stair-step it up. We go in with the one-and-a-half megawatts of power to validate the technology and to see how much power we’re actually producing. Once you put something like that in a field environment, and it’s exposed to dust, heat, humidity, insects and pigeon poop, because Ft. Bliss has got a lot of pigeons, we have to figure out what we’re getting."

What they’re looking for initially is grid parity in terms of cost. "If Ft. Bliss wanted to go pay for the power to run their ranges, they would pay no more to us or to this concept to power up the ranges than they would pay to El Paso Electric to come out and run power to them, so the cost to them is the same," Tudor stated.

Even with the technology, and assuming it in fact does what is expected of it, there are drawbacks. "Your biggest drawback with solar energy is not the cost of solar panels, equipment or anything else, it’s the land," Tudor explained. "Solar energy requires surface area – lots of surface area."

However, there are ways to work around the issue. "Go to a warehouse owner and say ‘Let me put all these solar panels on the roof of your building, your energy to run your warehouse is free, and all the excess energy, I get to pump to the grid and make money on it.’ Who would say no?"

If all goes well with this research over the next couple of years, Atira Tech won’t be that small company that exists in an engineer’s garage. It just may be the next big thing for energy. Who knows. The world benefit could be enormous. It all waits to be seen.