A place in the sun: The Energy Show at Het Nieuwe Instituut

Consider Energy Quest, a board game designed by JW Faulk for Weldon Productions in 1977. It is a lot like Monopoly: you move around the board extracting value from various assets; trade with other players; and reap profits at a ‘Take off’ or ‘GO’ field. Some of the assets are renewable – there are solar power cells, a wind farm and a tidal power station, but the majority are fossil fuels: ‘Atlantic Offshore Oil Rig’, ‘New York Coal Power Site’, ‘Texas Oil Field’, and so on. The winner is determined when the oil embargo is lifted – no one knows when this will happen – and will not necessarily be the player who has acquired the most raw material or the greatest number of production sites. Instead, they will have accumulated the most ‘kW receipts’ – that is, sold the most energy. It is a zero-sum game of extraction and profiteering. Sound familiar?

Energy Quest is on display at Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI), part of a scene-setting timeline in The Energy Show: Sun, Solar and Human Power, an exhibition from curator and designer Matylda Krzykowski with self-proclaimed ‘solar designers’ Marjan van Aubel and Pauline van Dongen. It runs alongside the first edition of van Aubel and van Dongen’s Solar Biennale, a seven-week season of events and workshops exploring the design possibilities of solar energy – it will culminate next week at Eindhoven’s Dutch Design Week with the unveiling of a solar-powered pavilion. As the programming surrounding The Energy Show suggests, the exhibition sets its sights firmly on the sun, the original source of most forms of energy on Earth. Those hoping for an exploration of the broader complex of fuels that humans have extracted or harnessed should expect instead a more single-minded, campaigning exhibition.

The board game Energy Quest was designed by JW Faulk and distributed by Weldon Productions in 1977. Created in the aftermath of the oil crisis of 1973, the US game encourages players to monetise alternative forms of energy, while adhering to the rules of fossil capitalism

Credit: Aad Hoogendoorn / Het Nieuwe Instituut

‘The timeline does not only tell the technological story of solar power,’ explains HNI head of programme Flora van Gaalen, ‘but also the cultural and political story, of decisions made – or not made.’ It takes visitors through the initial scientific breakthroughs – Edmond Becquerel’s discovery of the photovoltaic effect in the 1830s, Augustin Mouchot’s experiments with solar-power engines in the following decades, and the first low-impact solar cell by Charles Fritts in 1883 – as well as stories of ancient sun worship and modern heliotherapy. The oil crisis of 1973, and various, more or less successful international summits on the environment from the Kyoto Protocol and onwards, also loom large. Peppered throughout are prescient quotes, with Thomas Edison offering the most on-the-nose summation of the show’s curatorial stance: ‘I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy,’ he supposedly told his friend Henry Ford once. ‘What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait till oil and coal run out before we tackle that.’

There are plenty of eye-opening examples of early experiments that attempted to tackle just that. The Dover Sun House (1948), in Dover, Massachusetts, was a collaboration between architect Eleanor Raymond and MIT engineer and biophysicist Mária Telkes, commissioned by Amelia Peabody. The ambition was to use only solar energy to keep the house warm – Telkes made a point of not including a backup heating system. An enormous heat-collecting panel in the place of the house’s first-floor windows fed heated air into three so-called ‘heat bins’ on the floor below. There, chemical salts would absorb the heat and store it for later use. Although the house did not quite work as intended, and was eventually demolished around 2010, Telkes’ technology is now widely used in chemical heat storage systems.

Mária Telkes and Eleanor Raymond's 1947 Solar House in Dover, Massachusetts, was an early experiment in incorporating solar energy into a home

It consisted of a huge heat-collecting panel on the first floor, whose thermal energy was stored in chemical 'heat bins' downstairs

On a larger scale, the show provides an extremely abridged history of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants. The first CSP was established in Maadi, now a suburb of Cairo, by US inventor Frank Schuman in the early 20th century – a 60m parabolic mirror-lined ‘trough’ was used to heat boilers, which would in turn generate steam power to irrigate agricultural land along the Nile. It closed after only two years, a casualty of the First World War, and the discovery of oil in Iraq shortly thereafter. Another CSP plant in White Cliffs, New South Wales, Australia’s first, was constructed in 1981, then adapted for photovoltaics (PVs), but closed in 2004. Currently, the largest CSP in operation is located in the Mojave Desert, California. The Energy Show does a good job of emphasising how long the history of solar energy production is, but does not explain why the highlighted examples closed, or why CSPs and PV panels have not been implemented more widely when the technology has existed for more than a century.

Addressing this would require a foray into the vested interests of fossil capital – which is, admittedly, a big ask for a relatively small display on solar design. But it would also mean asking critical questions about solar technology itself. PV panels, in particular, have come to dominate the solar energy sector. How efficient are they? What of the material impact of the cells’ constituent parts (silicon, aluminium, copper and various rare metalloids)? And of their energy storage systems? What waste streams do they create and how can they be recycled? Solar energy offers extraordinary possibilities in theory – ‘the sunlight that hits the Earth in a single hour provides more energy that the entire world consumers in a year,’ the curators’ opening text reads – but in practice it is not, on its own, a silver bullet.

Studio Ossidiana and TU Delft’s proposal for the Moreelse neighbourhood in Utrecht makes use of thin PV curtains

Credit: Studio Ossidiana

As The Energy Show moves towards contemporary examples of solar design, it abandons the large infrastructural scale of CSPs. Here, there are fascinating examples that ‘fold’ PVs and organic photovoltaics (OPVs) into everyday design objects: van Aubel’s Current Table (2014), for example, which collects energy from diffused light and is fitted with a USB port for charging devices. Studio Pauline van Dongen’s textile work, both in the form of Solar Shirt (2015) and Suntex – a flexible fabric interwoven with thin-film OPV cells – affords exciting opportunities not only for wearables but larger tensile surfaces. Studio Ossidiana and the TU Delft’s proposed ‘solar curtain’, designed for use on an architectural scale in the listed neighbourhood of Moreelse in Utrecht, offers a glimpse of how solar textiles might be used in the context of existing buildings. Unfortunately, the project has currently stalled due to lack of funding.

The modest scale of these interventions is suggestive of van Aubel and van Dongen’s ambitions with the Solar Biennale, which have just as much to do with changing the popular perception of solar energy – think unsightly PV cells plonked onto rooftops – as they do with material experimentation. ‘The prevailing solar narrative focuses on technical and economic considerations, [on] efficiency and payback time,’ they write on the biennial’s website. ‘Solar farms are being rolled out at breakneck speed to meet the growing need but in our haste, we merely pile on existing ideas.’ Smaller design solutions that offer some energy independence – however limited – is where van Aubel and van Dongen have staked their claim. The board game Energy Quest and its monopolising logic springs to mind once again. What might solar design look like if it broke free from its rulebook?