Could I have a 19th Century American Society Develop Solar Power from Blueprints?

Question

My inspiration was this: Could solar power be utilized and substitute coal in the 19th century?

My world is this: Rail Transportation with Races Described Below - Specifically, Seating

My people are 2,000 years into the future, and 1,900 years from a nuclear war that made humans leave. Humans are back on the scene, but have only been around for 200 years.

Story Time!

Roughly 60 years before the setting, an adventuring party consisting of a female Pharera Cleric of Esuna (Goddess of Love/Death), a male Drava Diviner, a male Human Rogue, and a female Gern Barbarian discovered blueprints for solar panels in the Andes (Specifically, in the ruins of Lima) and brought it to their Drava employers, who were only expecting undead and demons in the ruins. Drava being Drava, they enlisted the help of humans to develop the technology. Once they got the tech down pat, they began using the tech to make prototype of a solar panel-powered steam engines.

Once this was done, a wealthy Avandra man, who ran a textile company, took one look at the article in his newspaper, saw dollar signs scribbled all over it (Metaphorically), and asked the sage responsible for inventing the solar panel if he could have more made to power a large cotton spinning mill, using the solar power as fuel for machines. The sage didn't really have much to show for the solar power being useful, but she did have a few dozen people making them, so she accepted. A few years later (50 years to the setting), the Avandra had several textile factories and was crushing his business competitors by pioneering mass production.

By this time, a Na'vi business advisor of the Avandra, Neytiri, saw that the little workshop he depended on for solar panels was just too slow for future expansion. The Avandra, upon hearing this, uttered the most famous words of the earliest industrial revolution - "Neytiri, solar panels don't just sprout off trees! If you want more of them, make 'em yourself!"

This gave Neytiri the defining idea that led the world into the upward, inescapable spiral to the industrial revolution part 2 - Use the Avandra's ideas for mass producing textiles and put it into making the solar panels. A few years later (46 years to setting), she had a big factory of her own, supplying several other people with big ideas with solar panels. She also hired the sage responsible for inventing the solar panels for Research and Development. Neytiri was so successful that the company she founded with only the sage and a few thousand dollars, Neytiri Solar Panels, still holds a near monopoly on the solar panel industry and a Thanalan Civilian Medal of Honor (The highest medal a Thanalan civilian can earn) from Neytiri hung in the CEO office room in the office building the business runs from, along with the honor of almost single-handedly starting the Industrial Revolution for a second time.

However, I don't know if your average 19th Century society, even one as rich as America IRL, could create a solar panel, even one with a blueprint for the panels. If a 19th Century society COULD form solar panels, please tell me how.

Here are the materials for a Solar Panel:

1. Silicon
2. Lithium
3. POLYCRYSTALLINE Silicon

My basic question is: Have these 3 materials been around since at least 1750?

Answer 1

Solar photovoltaic cells such as you propose, are completely impossible with 19th century infrastructure, even if they have detailed blueprints. You absolutely need ultrapure silicon, and vacuum deposition of other ultrapure chemicals, and sub-sub microscopic connections, and... You might be able to cobble together a mechanism that demonstrates the effect, but making something that actually produces any useful power would be several steps past your best ability. Even early 20th century tech is not up to it. You need 1950's tech to make anything like that, and really 1970's tech to make it practical.

But solar thermal is very achievable. Solar collectors heating a working material, driving a steam turbine, are quite achievable with 19th century tech, given a suitable blueprint & manufacturing specs. You might even be able to swing it with 15th century tech, if you are willing to accept a very inefficient system. (bad optics, low pressure boilers, inadequate metallurgy for generator parts)

Answer 2

I'm going to answer the broader question: Could the 19th Century build modern solar panels?

No

1. The best scientists of the 19th century would be unable to understand the blueprints of today. I know this because as an Electrical Engineer, I'm familiar with schematic symbols that simply didn't exist 120+ years ago. Said symbols would have no meaning and would require multiple textbooks to explain to the degree that the components could be fabricated (and then you'd need a mountain of textbooks to build the fabrication facility. See #3).

2. Technology is a pyramid. You're taking an idea from the top of the pyramid, which depends on all other things below it, and asking if that could be dealt with somewhere in the middle of the pyramid. You need 21st century manufacturing, tooling, materials science, metallurgy, computers (including at least CRT monitors), software, printers, power generation, everything down to precision screwdrivers that didn't exist back then. You'd need transportation, refrigeration, foundry services... a proverbial thousand-and-one things and each and every one of them are needed just to produce a modern solar panel. Factories would need to be built to build the precision tools needed for the next factory to build more precise tools for the next factory until you can finally build the silicon substrate.

3. Which means you're not delivering blue prints. You're delivering a university-sized library of blueprints, text books, scientific papers, etc., to help educate the 19th century scientists so they even knew what they were looking at when they examined the blueprints.

We get questions of this type several times a year ("Can X tech be had at point Y in the past?"). The higher the tech and the further back you go, the more absolutely certain the answer is "no." It took us this long to invent the tech. It's really, really, really, really hard to speed that process up in any way. And an important reason is the factory level 1 to build factory level 2 to build factory level 3 dependencies. By the time you've built all those factories and finally produced an equivalent solar cell, you're only 10-20 years shy of when it happened in the first place.

Think about it... there weren't even as many people back then — and you need to train millions in vocations that didn't exist back then to build all those factories, tools, etc.

So... no.

One last thing: When a previous OP asked if it was possible to create a chart of technology dependencies, even that question was deemed so large that it violated SE's book rule. Most people who think questions like this can be realistically answered don't actually understand the historical tech dependencies to make a pencil. I apologize for the brutal answer — but if you want to write "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," I recommend you just do it and not try to justify how it could be done.

Answer 3

Silicon was first isolated in 1808, before that Lavoisier

suspected that silica might be an oxide of a fundamental chemical element, but the chemical affinity of silicon for oxygen is high enough that he had no means to reduce the oxide and isolate the element.

The above is sufficient to say that the answer to your question is no.

Lithium instead

It was not isolated until 1821, when William Thomas Brande obtained it by electrolysis of lithium oxide,

Wrapping up, forget about solar cells in the time you are proposing.

Answer 4

You do not even need a steam engine/turbine, see Solar updraft tower and Energy tower (downdraft).

Answer 5

I agree with the other answers about photovoltaics being out of reach (keep digging in the ruins and you may find useful info to get you closer).

On the other appendage, a simple solar box oven can trim your need for coal or wood for cooking. It can also be used to sterilize water. A solar water heater could be used as a power source or as an item to allow luxurious hot showers (lose power for a few days after a hurricane and you'll learn to appreciate the luxury even the simplest solar water heater).

Once these simple uses of solar become common, scaling up to some of the other excellent suggestions made in other answers should be even easier (at least in terms of convincing those with money or political power to let you try).

Answer 6

My basic question is: Have these 3 materials been around since at least 1750?

Lithium was first isolated by Johan Arfvedson in 1817. Silicon was first isolated by Jöns Jacob Berzelius in 1823.

Polycrystalline silicon was a little later. It was 1918 when Jan Czochralski produced a method to grow single crystals of various metals. Gordon Teal and John Little at Bell Labs adapted this to silicon in 1948.

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But do you want those specific materials, or do you want photovoltaic panels in general?

• Charles Fritts installed the world's first rooftop photovoltaic solar array, using 1%-efficient selenium cells, on a New York City roof in 1884. You should be aware that selenium solar cells existed 60 years before silicon ones, and consider

• Augustin Mouchot demonstrated solar-thermal steam engines in the 1860s and 1870s.

• George Cove built a solar energy generator in 1904 (which means the same could probably have been built in the 19th century, five years earlier, if they'd have Cove's blueprints). This one was based on the thermoelectric effect observed by Thomas Seebeck in either 1821 or 1822 (sources differ).Thermoelectric solar panels look like solar panels, could be built in the 19th century. The choice of thermoelectric material affects the efficiency. Seebeck used copper and iron. Other more advanced materials get more juice.

• Another method would be to use the sun to heat a Stirling engine, which works on very small temperature differences (unlike the large temperature differences of a steam engine) and has been around since the early 1800s