Fossil vs. Flow: The Kabbalistic energy philosophy of solar pioneer Arnold Goldman

Arnold Goldman, (1943-2017) who died in June, has a fair claim to be called the father of the global solar energy industry. He was also an extraordinary creative thinker, deeply influenced by kabbalah. Vast solar thermal plants around the world bear witness to Arnold’s technological achievements, but his books of thought, photocopied and circulated among friends and family were never published, though Arnold had very much hoped that at least one would be before he died.

The legendary** Luz International Corporation was founded by Arnold Goldman in 1980, with headquarters in Jerusalem and Oakland, CA.** By the late 1980s, Luz was the undisputed world leader in solar energy production. It was the first company to prove that solar energy could be generated commercially on a scale that would supply the needs of major utility providers. In 1989, the Luz plants in California’s Mojave Desert produced no less than 90% of the solar energy generated on the planet. Between 1984 and 1990, Goldman’s company installed 340 MW of Solar Electrical Generating Systems (SEGS) at nine locations in Southern California. In ten years of operation, Luz drove down the price of solar energy from 24 cents per KWh to just eight in the final system that went into production, and six for systems on the drawing boards. These spectacular efficiency gains were of an order that was more characteristic of the semiconductor industry than of a business in which the deliverables were steel, glass and construction equipment. Almost twenty years before Google announced the goal of achieving RE<C (renewable energy that is cheaper than coal), Goldman believed that the holy grail of price parity between renewable and fossil energy sources was well within Luz’s grasp.

But with oil prices having reached an all-time low of US$17 per barrel, fossil fuels were cheap and seemingly inexhaustible. Governments saw no need to nurture alternative energy sources any longer. (Most, it could be argued, had never seen the need in the first place.) In 1991, the Governor of California overruled a 90% majority vote in the California State Assembly and elected not to renew the land tax exemption on Luz’s solar energy fields, leading to large cost overruns in the construction of the company’s ninth plant. Luz collapsed; its team dispersed. The original nine SEGS continue to produce significant amounts of solar energy in Southern California to this day. In their quiet, continuing effectiveness, they are a utopian counterpoint to the oil- and coal-favoring energy policies of successive American administrations.

Outwardly, Arnold Goldman moved on from Luz. He set up a high-tech consulting business, dabbled in medical technology, and in 1998 co-founded another company, InSyst Ltd, which developed systems for automating complex semi-conductor production processes. Yet privately he admits that he was thinking and writing about Luz almost constantly in the years after its collapse, endeavoring to analyze and learn from the company’s failure. For Goldman, Luz had never been just a clean technology business; it was his life’s work, and it was inspired directly by his spiritual beliefs. And in mid-2004, when climate change was becoming a serious concern and a renewed call went out for technologies to save the planet, he was convinced the time had come to put the company back together again.

..Kabbalistic thought is all over the blueprints for both incarnations of Luz: a couple of Jerusalem’s leading Kabbalists were retained by the original Luz in order to help the engineers and physicists solve technical problems; and before establishing Luz, Goldman had written two dense and detailed books of Jewish thought (photocopied and circulated to a few dozen friends and contacts) that set out the metaphysical and mystical propositions that he hoped to verify through the company’s work. Although much of Goldman’s thinking is couched in the arcane categories of Kabbalah, it contains profound and universally relevant messages about the significance of renewable energy – and, more importantly still, it really works.

..“Project Luz” set out the theoretical and practical basis for a community based on technology which can weave humanity back into the fabric of the created world. It is the work of a formidable autodidact. It is also, in parts, all but incomprehensible. The diverse and uniquely personal assemblage of sources and subject matter means that there probably aren’t more than a handful of people who have read and grasped the whole book. (I confess to having skimmed over a fifty page excursus on how one might design an experiment that could empirically verify the reality of free will – the most important emergent property, in Goldman’s view – based on the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen test.) One chapter explored the ontology of emergent properties, “barotes” in Goldman’s coinage – characteristics that inhere in complex forms of organization but are not present in its component parts. Another section posited and began to develop an alternative arithmetic that can do justice to our everyday sense of how these barotes emerge from simple elements: “We see daily that one and one is not really two…one mother, one father and one child, under the right conditions make one family.”

But in spite of all the hermetic obscurities, when “Project Luz” came to spell out the real-world consequences of his metaphysical speculations, Goldman’s vision was clear and compelling. He dreamed of creating an ideal community called Luz, whose members would be enabled to live their daily lives in a way that maximized their freedom and their consciousness of taking part in the ongoing evolution of the universe. This would require the creation of homes, businesses, schools and communities that would allow a human being to experience his interconnectedness with the world “with his eyes, with his hands, with ears, nose and mouth, as an observer and as a participant in changing the world around him to meet his needs.” Energy was one area in which Goldman felt that humans were particularly cut off from an appreciation of their connection to natural processes: “The myriad of political entities, drilling and mining companies, distribution companies and volumes of rules and regulations governing the production of fossil fuels makes it impossible for its recipient to comprehend the causal process, much less exercise any control over his situation.”

..Next to the painting of Jacob is a painting of the Hebrew letter aleph, calligraphed in luminescent shades of crimson and gold. The aleph (א) was a figure adopted by both the nineteenth century mathematician Cantor and by Jewish Kabbalists as a symbol of infinity.

Endorsed by celebrities such as Madonna, Demi Moore and Britney Spears, there has been a renewed interest, both popular and scholarly in the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah during recent years. In written form, Kabbalah dates back to the Sefer Yezirah, the “Book of Creation” that appeared around the year 400. Tradition, however, avers that the ideas in the Sefer Yezirah were conceived some 2,000 years earlier by the Patriarch Abraham, in the desert around the site where Luz2’s solar plant stands today.

..There are moments in our conversation when Goldman’s integration of technology and mysticism stretches credibility. At one point he remarks: “One of the Luz plants that’s still in operation in the US, at Kramer Junction in California, produced extraordinary results for the incidence of solar radiation falling on the site. We have year-on-year NASA data showing that over the past twenty years that plant has enjoyed the second highest intensity of sunlight of any place on the planet, a marked increase on the previous period.” And then in exactly the same quiet, unassuming way he adds: “You know, the people that built that plant really loved the work, more than any other construction team I’ve worked with. I really believe that their love is what drew down those exceptional levels of sunlight to the place. I’d like to find a way to test that sort of thing empirically.”

..Luz2, now renamed Brightsource Israel has just agreed with Southern California Edison that it will build solar plants supplying 1.3GW of electricity (a deal exceeding by almost 50% the previous record-setting contract with Pacific Gas and Electricity I’d learned about during the ceremony in the Negev).