3. An Electric Revolution: Did a 1909 kidnapping derail the future of solar power?

In this episode of An Electric Revolution, I explore the forgotten story of George Cove — a Canadian inventor and one of the world’s first solar entrepreneurs. In the early 1900s, decades before the modern solar boom, Cove was building working solar panels and dreaming of a future powered by the sun. But in 1909, after a mysterious kidnapping, his efforts came to a sudden halt — a moment that may have set back the development of solar energy by decades.

You can also listen on Spotify and Apple podcasts.

I’m delighted to be joined by

Dr Sugandha Srivastav

. She is a Lecturer in Environmental Economics and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Oxford. She also writes the

Net Zero Notes

newsletter on Substack, which I highly recommend signing up to.

Born in Nova Scotia in 1863 or 1864, Cove presented his first “solar electric generator” in 1905 in the Metropole Building in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

He then moved to the US to continue work on his solar device. In 1909 he exhibited four solar panels on a New York rooftop, which were used to charge lead-acid batteries.

This was decades before the first conventional photovoltaic solar panel as we know it today was invented at Bell Labs.

Cove intended to use the heat of the sun to generate electricity, a so-called thermoelectric generator. But he may have accidentally created a solar panel that generated electricity via the photovoltaic effect - similar to current panels we have today.

In October of the same year Cove was kidnapped. Some reports say his life was threatened if he did not cease work on solar power. Afterwards his company, Sun Electric Generator Company, collapsed.

In 2023 Srivastav published a fascinating paper on George Cove which argued that solar powercould have become cheaper than coal at least a decade earlier than it did, if Cove’s business had succeeded.

She argues that in the early 1900s people were remarkably positive about solar power and its potential, yet that attitude then disappeared for decades.

LINKS:

Lost potential: how the kidnapping of a solar energy pioneer impacted the cost of renewable energy and the climate crisis⁠

⁠How to Build a Low-tech Solar Panel?⁠

⁠Untangling the Mystery of the World’s First Rooftop Solar Panel⁠

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