Bright idea: Edison may bill customers for sunlight.

Bright idea: Edison may bill customers for sunlight

Jones bends over and squints at the electric-utility meter attached to the side of his building. The dials are spinning backwards. He nods, satisfied, and saunters back into his business.

On the roof lies a vast carpet of new-generation solar cells. They produce more electricity than he can use, so he sells the excess back to his local utility.

Is Jones the business owner of the future? Perhaps.

In an Alice-in-Wonderland scenario, with back-spinning dials and property owners renting their rooftops to the highest bidder, Southern California Edison Co. is pioneering a revolutionary solar cell that could create dizzying changes in how we buy electricity.

In April, Edison made headlines by announcing that it and co-developer Texas Instruments Inc. were testing a new ented solar technology system that might be five times cheaper to buy than conventional solar cells. The dreamy stuff was called "Spheral Solar" because its genius lay in tiny solar balls made from low-cost, low-purity silicon that, when glued on aluminum foil, turn sunlight into electricity.

Enthusiasm burst across the country. Dan Rather heralded the little spheres on CBS' Evening News and more than 1,000 phone calls pelted Edison's operators in the next few days.

Suddenly many possibilities were pondered. With a big storage battery and about $5,000 invested in Edison's new cells, you might power your house indefinitely and never face another bill from the utility again. (Small business owners, add a zero to that dollar sum.) Naturally, many have wondered if Edison might put itself out of business this way.

"People think we're shooting ourselves in the foot. That's certainly the way it looks," admitted Edison solar spokesman Richard Keeler.

But alas, there are hitches.

First, Edison and 50-50 co-owner Texas Instruments never promised they would sell you the stuff. It might have to be be leased, for instance.

The 105-year-old utility, hardly a naive player, doesn't plan to jeopardize its Mississippi River-sized revenue stream. Last year electricity sales amounted to $6.9 billion.

But before you gnash your teet over a big, wily utility somehow managing to put a price tag on the sun -- consider the flip side.

Solar experts say ownership might not be worth it. Even a consumer advocate doubts that everybody would rush into purchases.

"A lot of people may not want to mess with it," warned attorney Joel Singer, on staff at consumer lobby named TURN (Toward Utility Rate Normalization) in San Francisco. "If the link between you refrigerator and your solar cell goes out, and it means gettin' up on the roof to fix it, that'll be your responsibility," said Singer.

While his group has fought many "exhorbitant" rate hikes by Edison in the last few years, it has no beef with Edison's service. Most customers agree it's rather good, and they might rather like an Edison truck to buzz out quickly and fix solar snafus, too.

Sure, some Edison customers are fiercely independent. Or they detest the utility for some reason. "They'll be up on the ladder with a hammer and nails" installing the solar cells as fast as they can, Singer predicts.

Just when Spheral Solar may be used depends on whether the sandpaper-like substance can be pumped out of plants cheaply and quickly.

That's the billion-dollar question.

"Ultimately we'd like the manufacturing to go as fast as a carpet mill -- measured in feet per second," said Keeler.

If the utility plays its cards right, it could sell its technology to the four corners of the earth. Experts say the most appropriate, cost-efficient locations are the more remote, sunny spots. That encompases much of the Third World.

Think of the profits.

But Edison is regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission, which holds the quasi-monopoly's profits to a 15 percent return on equity, so it won't gouge captive consumers. Excess profits must be returned to its 4 million customers. So, a lucrative sale to Kuwaitis, for instance, might actually lower rates for all business and home customers. The odd twists to Spheral Solar's business prospects are daunting.

"Nobody has ever had the opportunity to wonder about this before," said Nick Patapoff, co-inventor and project manager for Edison who was invited last week to explain Spheral Solar at a United Nations-sponsored solar energy conference in Brazil.

"If he followed up on every invitation, he wouldn't spend any time here," said a co-worker at Edison. "Inquiries come in every day, especially from the Japanese."

Patapoff has to struggle daily with questions and appeals from the curious, the skeptical and the eager. It's a new challenge for the inventor, who normally shares the cabin of his '85 pick-up truck with piles of scientific papers and journals, driving to home evenings to suburban La Habra where he lives with a wife and two children.

"I've heard from financial people in New York, pension funds, investment bankers and import-export banks," said Patapoff, who still seems patient and friendly. "Some want an equity stake," he explained.

No kidding.

But if Edison were to slice a piece of the pie to someone else, a top contender might be Mission Energy Co., its sister company. Mission builds power plants and is owned by the same holding company as Edison, Rosemead-based SCECorp. Mission "might make a direct investment" and market the technology overseas, speculated Patapoff, indicating that's one idea on the table.

While some, including Singer, will be watching if Edison and Mission try to do a little self-dealing, others are somewhat skeptical of Spheral Solar's prospects.

"I've read their patent description . . . and they'd better find an automated way of spreading all these BBs around on aluminum sheets," warned Frank Goodman, senior manager of photovoltaic projects at the Electric Power Research Institute. A square inch of Spheral Solar contains about 1,000 tiny silicon globes, so small that the flat material is extremely flexible.

"I want to know how they're going to get the cost of that process down to where they could compete with thin-film photo-voltaics," said Goodman, whose research group is funded by utilities. With the latter technology, a film of copper indium diselenide or an amorphous silicon alloy is simply sprayed on glass. But that technology is still a decade away from the market.

Goodman says he's more optimistic about the Edison-TI invention than most: "I'm not shootin' it down. All I can say is, let's give it a whirl."

Patapoff knows that currently available solar cells deliver a watt for about $5, but he must turn out Spheral Solar at about $1 per watt to make it competitive with conventional electricity generated from gas, oil, nuclear and other sources.

But while he and metallurgists at Edison and TI try to trim costs, others dream of trimming sails. One man called Patapoff and asked if he could use the solar sheeting for sails on his boat. "He was tickled with the idea that it was flexible, and that his ship would be totally environmentally benign." No oil-burning outboard motor to pollute the air, nor grease dripping into the blue ocean.

No luck. Spheral solar is too heavy. "Also, I told him you can't always sail toward the sun," said Patapoff.

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