Area Company Pursues Sea Solar Technology

Jun 12 - The Patriot-News

After 40 years of trying to sell the world on clean electricity from the sun and sea, James H. Anderson has come to expect disappointment.

Anderson, of Sea Solar Power Inc., and his late father, J. Hilbert Anderson, have been written about on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and in U.S. News & World Report, albeit in the mid-1970s. Everyone loved their technology. But no one, thus far, has been willing to put up the money to push it over the top into commercial use.

They haven't given up, says Anderson, who is 64. The technology works, he emphasized, and there is a need in the world for more clean electric power.

"It's not an easy project to sell," he admits. "The prototype [plant] will be expensive. We're a little company. People have to have faith we can do it."

Sea Solar, which is based in Jacobus in York County, has a technology that would exploit the vast temperature difference between sun-warmed water at the surface of tropical oceans and the frigid water far below. The warm water would turn a refrigerant chemical to vapor, which would spin the blades of a turbine and create electricity. Super-cold water from the ocean depths would then return the vapor to liquid state and start the process over again.

As part of the process, it would convert large amounts of seawater to drinkable fresh water, Anderson said, and create fishing hot spots by bringing nitrogen-rich deep water to the surface.

Over the years, sea solar power proponents have talked grandly of hundreds or thousands of their power plants in the tropical oceans meeting a significant part of the world's electricity needs. Anderson says his technology could generate electricity for 4 cents to 4 1/2 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with conventionally generated power but without the emissions.

Power plants using his technology could be built on the shore of a tropical island, for example, or float offshore on ships. All the components are designed, Anderson said. No "inventing" remains to be done.

Only testing.

And financing.

Always the financing.

Anderson also owns a company called Coupling Corp., which makes couplings for power plants and other users of large machinery, including newspapers. It generates about $1 million a year in revenues and is "a growing business," he said.

Coupling shares space with Sea Solar Power in a former AMP Inc. factory in Jacobus that Anderson purchased in 2003. He leases out part of the space to other small businesses. Including himself, about 10 people work for the two companies.

His father, who died at age 95 in 2004, was a Penn State University-trained engineer who designed compressors for air-conditioning giant York International Corp. and has his name on more than 125 U.S. and foreign patents, according to his son. The elder Anderson rose to become chief engineer for York International, which was bought last year by Johnson Controls Inc.

He had been interested in the possibilities of sea solar power since reading the work of Georges Claude, the French inventor of neon lights. Claude was a student of Jacques-Arsene d'Arsonval, the first proponent of sea solar power, but went beyond his professor's theoretical work by building working plants in Cuba in 1930 and off the coast of Brazil in 1935. Both were destroyed by storms, according to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia.

"We started working on this in the early 1960s," Jim Anderson said. "I was still in school. We realized we could make improvements on what Claude did."

The Frenchman's system used water and steam to turn the turbines. The elder Anderson, with his refrigeration background, realized that various coolant chemicals could be used more efficiently. Jim Anderson wrote his senior thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the possibilities for a floating, sea solar power plant off the coast of Florida. Articles in Power and Mechanical Engineering magazines followed in 1966.

Father and son incorporated Sea Solar Power in August 1973, according to state corporation records. In October, the Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors broke out, which precipitated America's first energy crisis.

There have been apparent breakthroughs along the way, but disappointment inevitably followed. In 1997, Sea Solar Power reached a preliminary memorandum of understanding with the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to build a 100 megawatt floating plant in the Indian Ocean off the country's southern tip.

"It required us to pay for the unit," Anderson said. "They were not putting up any money, but they agreed to buy the power."

Asked about the risk of storms, Anderson said floating power plants are no more at risk than deep-water offshore oil drilling platforms. In other words, he said, it's a manageable risk.

Sea Solar Power has licensed its technology to the Abell Foundation in Baltimore, which was originally funded by the family that owned the Baltimore Sun newspaper. The $300 million foundation invested money in the company to help fund development work, Anderson said, but ultimately was not wealthy enough to underwrite a prototype plant.

Most financial support ended in 2004, he said, and was a blow to his father, who died that summer.

Robert C. Embry Jr., president of the Abell Foundation, characterized it differently. He said the foundation originally agreed to fund a study of the cost of building a prototype plant, which he said was $100 million for a land-based plant and $400 million for a floating plant.

"There was no requirement to keep paying them," Embry said.

Abell Foundation continues to actively market Sea Solar Power's technology, he said. If they can find someone willing to agree to purchase the electricity and fresh water an initial plant would produce, more money from the foundation could flow to the company.

"We would finance and own the plant through a separate entity," Embry said. "We're spending a good deal of money to market it."

Anderson has been at this so long that 10 of the company's 13 patents on various aspects of the technology have expired. He insists that won't be a problem in attracting investors, because of other trade secrets owned by Sea Solar Power.

His father never lost his passion for the technology, Anderson said, despite not living to see it come to fruition.

"I hope to see it come into being in my lifetime," he said optimistically.

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