The First Solar Power Plant: 1916
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 2, 2025“We have proved the commercial profit of sun power in the tropics and have more particularly proved that after our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the sun.” – Frank Shuman, quoted in “American Inventor Uses Egypt’s Sun for Power,” New York Times, July 2, 1916.
Solar electricity is not an infant industry. The following Wiki information (verbatim) on the inventor Frank Shuman tells an important part of the story.
- On August 20, 1897, Shuman invented a solar engine that worked by reflecting solar energy onto one-foot square boxes filled with ether, which has a lower boiling point than water, and containing black pipes on the inside, which in turn powered a toy steam engine. The tiny steam engine operated continuously for over two years on sunny days next to a pond at the Shuman house.
- In 1908 Shuman formed the Sun Shine Power Company with the intent to build larger power plants. He, along with his technical advisor A.S.E. Ackermann and British physicist Sir Charles Vernon Boys, developed an improved system using mirrors to reflect solar energy upon collector boxes, increasing heating capacity so much that water could now be used instead of ether.
- He also developed a low-pressure steam turbine [with] … sun-heated water. Shuman’s turbine processed energy four times faster than any engine of his day. Shuman then constructed a full-scale steam engine that was powered by low-pressure steam, enabling him to patent the entire solar engine system by 1912.
- Shuman built the world’s first solar thermal power station in Maadi, Egypt (1912-1913). Shuman’s plant used semicircle shaped troughs to power a 60-70 horsepower engine that pumped 6,000 gallons of water per minute from the Nile River to adjacent cotton fields. His system included a number of technological improvements, including absorption plates with dual panes separated by a one-inch air space.
- Although the outbreak of World War I and the discovery of cheap oil in the 1930s discouraged the advancement of solar energy, Shuman’s vision and basic design were resurrected in the 1970s with a new wave of interest in solar thermal energy.[8]
Fallacious Argument
Solar electricity in modern life is strictly a niche industry. It is not grid competitive but has off-grid applications, such as in decades past. It is a starter energy where propane and other dense energies are not available. The ‘infant industry” argument is not persuasive; entrepreneurs have been trying to fit in concentrated solar for well over a century.
This completes a three-part series on solar energy, the first being on the history of solar tax credits and the second being on the (false) 1994 claim of solar competitiveness.