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Luncheon Remarks
Transforming the Glass City into
the Solar City:
Toledo’s Tradition of
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio)
Rep. Kaptur (D-Ohio) began by thanking the National Academies, and she
said it was an honor to speak on a subject that “promotes economic and environ -
mental sustainability and energy independence for our nation, which is my top
priority as a member of the defense committee.”
She asked, “How can it be that Toledo, Ohio, ended up leading our nation in
such a key area of energy independence.” First, she said, the power rates charged
by investor-owned utilities along Lake Erie’s south coast to Cleveland are among
the most expensive in the nation and constitute “a serious impediment to eco -
nomic growth in our region. It is amazing that we have the industry we have in
view of these incredible prices.” She said she also represented “the worst nuclear
power plant in the United States,” which had averaged one incident per decade
over the last two decades.
“Unlike regions that have subsidized power through a federal power market-
ing authority like Bonneville or the Tennessee Valley Authority,” she said, “we
must reinvent our power future, drawing on our natural assets to be competitive
in the global marketplace.” She said that there were no “cushions,” as there are in
the government centers of Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio, because she
comes from “the free-market part of America. We have to grow and build wealth.
We’re resentful that New York, Charlotte, and other financial centers have traded
that wealth away. But we know what we have to do in order to build our future
and America’s future.”
THE GLASS CAPITAL
A second reason this region of Ohio had built a reputation as a leader in new
energy technologies, Congresswoman Kaptur said, is that Toledo historically has
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been known as the glass capital of the world. She reviewed some major Toledo
companies that had succeeded in leading the glass industry, including Libby
Owens Ford (now Pilkington), Johns Manville, Owens Illinois, and Libbey, Inc.
These companies were supported by the region’s silica and lime reserves, and
by glass physics research and generations of business leaders. Glass expertise,
she said, had led to a range of skills around solar energy, including solar energy
building materials, heat shields, and fiber optics.
Her own interest in renewable energy began long ago, she said, and gained depth
when she served as White House policy advisor to President Jimmy Carter. “I lived
the oil embargo of the late 1970s,” she said, “and we all saw what it did to our country.
It was the first slap in the face, really hard, and it knocked our teeth out.” She recalled
President Carter’s message that what we endured was the “moral equivalent of war,
and he remains right to this day. But the nation forgot his message.”
She worked as a city and regional planner for almost two decades before
running for Congress in the early 1980s. She said she was always interested in
sustainability, at every level, and in building on natural assets. In the 1980s, the
unemployment in her region was higher than she had ever seen it, and she realized
she wanted to represent those in her community who were “up against the wall. I
had to be their voice,” she said, “and that’s what motivated me to run.”
“WOW, THEY CAN DO IT HERE”
During the Reagan administration, Congresswoman Kaptur said, federal sup-
port for photovoltaic research and alternative energy was substantially diminished,
but in her congressional activities, she tried to promote photovoltaics and the re-
search needed to make it more efficient. She recalled meeting Dr. Harold McMas-
ter, who invited her out to a university laboratory to show her a vacuum chamber.
He was about to build some of the first films for a company that has become First
Solar. She was drawn to his enthusiasm immediately, and watched closely the com-
panies he founded, which, she said, “all made money.” She recalled a time when a
car company charged him with building an especially difficult window. “I thought,
‘You’ll never be able to build it, it will crack.’ On the day when the first rear window
came off the line, it didn’t crack. We all went, ‘Wow, they can do it here.’”
“I watched this gentleman who loved our community,” she said—“a great
philanthropist. He and his colleagues invested in our local school system, gave
millions of dollars to our university, knew what it was to build a community and
a country. They respected one another and they knew they had to move America
forward. I remember their boundless vision to produce a new generation of
research and innovation for our country. They were both scientists and entrepre -
neurs at the same time, and they never quit innovating.”
Congresswoman Kaptur gave Dr. McMaster and others full credit for “doing
so much when America was asleep.” In 2007 the Economist magazine described
Toledo as one of the six places on earth with real strength in new solar-powered
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102 FUTURE OF PHOTOVOLTAICS MANUFACTURING
systems and one of only three in this hemisphere. “This it isn’t by accident,” she
said. “It’s because many people have given their lives to it.” She said that Ohio
had just recognized the two-decade-long effort pursuing innovation and R&D by
funding the Wright Center for Photovoltaics Innovation and Commercialization
at the University of Toledo. She praised the university for its progress in PV, and
recalled that at a recent World Energy Conference in Abu Dhabi, the United States
was represented by only two universities—MIT and the University of Toledo.
SOME “BRUTAL FIGURES” ON ENERGY USE
Congresswoman Kaptur reminded her audience of some “brutal figures” on
energy use. In 2006, she said, a third of the U.S. trade deficit, which now ap-
proaches three-quarters of a trillion dollars, was from imported oil. “This,” she
said, “is a national security issue for our country.” Just as the disadvantage of
importing fuel is obvious, she said, so is a solution: to develop a comprehensive
plan to better use our domestic resources. “We are about that full-bore in our
region,” she said, “to recapture that three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year of
lost wealth back here at home.”
She listed the technologies that can contribute to this strategy, including
domestically produced biofuels, wind power (“Lake Erie is the Saudi Arabia of
wind”), the solar sector, geothermal power, hydrogen fuels, wave power, and fuel
cells. The potential of these new markets “is limited only by our technological
and industrial imagination,” she said. With half as many sunny days as Portugal,
she said, the world’s leading solar energy producer now is not the United States,
but Germany. That country now accounts for 15 percent of worldwide sales in
solar panels and other photovoltaic equipment, and has 15 of the 20 largest solar
plants. “That’s right,” she said, “a country located in northern Europe, with fewer
sunny days than Toledo, with no natural advantage, is outperforming the rest of
the world—because it sees the future.”
MORE SUBSIDY FOR NUCLEAR THAN FOR SOLAR
Congresswoman Kaptur compared the U.S. commitment to solar energy with
its commitment to nuclear power. Today nuclear power generates a large propor-
tion of our electricity, she said, but this happened through a concentrated and
deliberate approach to broaden our electrical usage. Between 1943 and 1999, she
said, the nuclear industry received over $145 billion in federal subsidies, without
counting tax subsidies. By contrast, the solar power industry had received some
$4.4 billion and the wind power industry $1.3 billion.
“We haven’t even begun to fight,” she said. “The fiscal cost of our continued
dependence on oil can be measured in many ways.” She said that in 2009 the
United States will spend over $600 billion on defense, the largest amount in U.S.
history. She said that much of that amount is spent to protect the Arabian Gulf
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region and central Asia, which together account for at least 64 percent of the
world’s petroleum reserves, 34 percent of its crude oil production, and 46 percent
of its natural resources. “For each of you, as citizens of this republic, you have
to ask, is this the world you want for your children,” she said. “And if it is, you
don’t have to change anything.”
Change can come, she said, through two things: First, a stable, long-term
funding strategy focused on basic energy research. Second, significant resources
devoted to commercialization of energy technologies. “From personal, residen -
tial, and vehicle to business uses,” she said, “the commercialization of this tech -
nology is key to transforming our economy and converting technologies from the
laboratory to the consumer.”
This is extremely difficult to do from a local or regional base, she said. One
way to start was to build the kind of demonstration project now installed at the
180th Fighter Wing in Toledo, where solar cells now produce a 1-MW research
base. “We’re going to keep pushing the science,” she said, “and equally important,
pushing the economics.” The head of the base had asked her why the national
guard plant was able to sell its excess power to the utility for 3 cents/kWh, while
the base is charged 9 cents/kW hr when it buys power from the utility. This, she
said, was an example of economics that need to change.
CHANGING OUR THINKING “FROM THE INSIDE OUT”
Another change Congresswoman Kaptur suggested was a change in think -
ing. She described a 5-mile corridor recently dug for a seven-foot storm-water
main. She mentioned to the utilities director that he could use that same corridor
for electrical power that would allow local residents and businesses to tap into
a new grid. “We would invest in it ourselves,” she said, “use the bonding power
of our city through its utilities department, put up solar power installations, and
pay for them over 25 years.” The utilities official acknowledged that he had not
been trained to do those things. “I told him, ‘Well, you know how to dig holes,
and you’ve got assets at your fingertips.’ We have to change our thinking from
the inside out. We have to think about the power we are abdicating every day and
retrain a whole generation of people to live in a new energy age.”
One reason Toledo had been so successful in spinning off solar technology,
she said, was that it had created a close partnership between the university, in-
dustry, and government. “They’re all working together,” she said. “Partisanship
doesn’t matter to them. Science matters, business matters, energy independence
matters. We have sustained our commitment to basic research as a prerequisite to
the development of solar companies, and we will never stop pushing the science.”
At the University of Toledo, two vehicles for doing this had been the Clean and
Alternative Energy Incubator and the Clean Energy Alliance of Ohio, which both
educate private interests in the technologies developed in the universities.
Congresswoman Kaptur concluded with a plea for “regionalized federal
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efforts” to transform science from the experimental stage into commercial tech -
nologies. As the population continues to increase and make their claims on
natural resources, she said, the challenge is to “sustain this country” and “be a
partner in the world for a sustainable earth. Part of the answer has to be renew -
able energy capitalizing on the historic strengths of places like Toledo. But we
all have to see that same future and that same possibility. We have everything we
need right in our area, including the sun. Even the symbol of Toledo has a rising
sun. It’s perfect.”
DISCUSSION
A participant spoke out on behalf of “a huge collaboration to get this tech-
nology moving faster and in a sustainable manner.” He suggested that models, if
not the actual collaborative programs, are already in place. “But I have not heard
any response from the people who are already involved in solar development as to
whether or not they accept the need for something as vast as these collaborations,
and whether they would consider joining.”
Dr. Zweibel responded that when he was at the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory, his colleagues formed research collaborations that were national in
scope, and some of which still existed. Researchers from many institutions met
with counterparts from universities and companies to discuss their work, then
returned to their home labs to work. Six months or so later they would meet again
with their partners, return home again, and so on. “These collaborations had the
essential element of continuity,” he said. “I think collaborations are most success-
ful when they start simply. If you want to understand solar cells, you start with
knowing what you need to do on a small scale. You keep doing that iteratively on
larger and larger samples and you get better and better at it. Once you have the
technology in place you can go to the next level of collaboration.”
Alvin Compaan of the University of Toledo thanked Congresswoman Kaptur
for her comments and support for photovoltaics over many years. He referred to
earlier discussions about challenges presented by East Asian and other govern -
ments that offer large incentives to solar companies, and the need to level the
playing field. He asked what discussions were under way in Congress about
these issues. Congresswoman Kaptur replied that she worried a great deal about
whether U.S. trade policies and tax policies were fair to U.S. business, including
those in renewable energy fields. She said that they were not fair, and U.S. busi-
ness faced “severe disadvantages” in the global market place. As an example of
unfair trade laws, she pointed to automobiles: “Fewer than 3 percent of the cars
in Japan are from any other country, whereas more than half the products sold in
the United States are from abroad, or from companies from abroad operating in
the United States. We’re the dump market of the world.”
Congresswoman Kaptur proposed one possible way to help rebalance this
situation. “If the federal government has money invested in a new technology,
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we might simply extend the patent term to allow production to occur only in the
United States.” She said a regulatory change would be simpler to execute than a
trade or tax law, as long as it was legal under GATT and WTO. “What troubles
me,” she said, “is to see someone in my district trying to birth new industry, but
another company can simply take all their innovation and move it somewhere
else where people work for low wages. My biggest worry is that somebody’s go-
ing to walk off with 100 years of effort who won’t love our community like Dr.
Compaan, Dr. McMaster, and Norm Johnston.”
