Solar-Hydrogen Farming in Wonder Valley

Understanding Concentrated Solar Power (CSP)

So a week later, I arranged with Jake to visit him at his home in Wonder Valley. I met his sweet dog and cat, and we talked for a bit about Jake's old high school yearbook and his Bethlehem family stories. After graduating from Liberty High School, he studied mathematics at East Stroudsburg University and then got a Masters of Science Engineering at West Virginia University. Since then, he’s worked a variety of engineering and design jobs with big companies like Hewlett Packard as well as several start-ups (Energy Innovations, eSolar). He holds five patents dating back to the 1970s, when he first started thinking on what he’s still developing today. In the 2000s, he worked in Research and Development for various solar start-ups incubated by the IdeaLab in Pasadena.

Jake unfurled the abbreviated bibliography of his thinking: he began with the March, 1976 issue of National Geographic, where he first read about other contemporaneous sustainable designers such as Steve Baer and Michael Reynolds. He would meet Baer at a conference in Amherst, MA later in the 1970s. As Jake recalls, he approached Baer after his presentation to greet him and show off his own freshly-minted patent. Baer immediately drew all over his patent--which was in fact only a copy--all his suggestions for how the design could be improved. That was the beginning of their long friendship. Whereas Baer's interests lay more in passive solar applications, his 1979 book Sunspots: An Exploration of Solar Energy Through Fact and Fiction (Albuquerque, NM: Rodale Press) remains a formative inspiration.

Jake then unrolled a scroll of drafting papers from the 70s, where he'd first begun to flesh out angles, dimensions, and motions. His designs mechanically follow the sun's daily and seasonal movements in the sky for the purpose of collecting more of the sun's energy. His 1976 patent (see Fig. 1-3 below) includes a series of trusses designed to hold mirrors. As the sun rises and rolls through the sky, the trusses can be simply, gradually adjusted over the course of the day to direct the sun's full reflection onto a single sensor above the entire array of mirrors, thus concentrating the sun's energy.

In the early 2000s, following the dot-com crash, Jake lost his job at Hewlett Packard. He was living in Colorado at the time, and he had some serious trouble finding a new job. Finally, he called up Steve Baer in Albuquerque to ask whether he needed any help. Steve told him to check out an article in the most recent issue of Discover. "These guys have money," he told Jake.

The August, 2003 Discover article, written by Jon R. Luoma, describes contemporary inventor Bill Gross and his burgeoning team in Southern California. At the time Gross and his team were exploring an alternative use of the sun's power -- rather than producing currents of electricity with photovoltaic cells (PV), they wanted to generate thermal heat by concentrating the sun's rays with mirrors onto a single photovoltaic cell (cp. starting a fire with a magnifying glass; the cell is called a HCPV, high concentration photovoltaic). Sound familiar? This model is now referred to as Concentrated Solar Power (CSP). Gross's team called their mirrors heliostats (Greek helios 'sun' + 'statos' (στατός) meaning 'standing,' 'set,' 'stat-ionary'). Their plans were constantly in flux, and thus the article from 2003 is evidently dated. However, Gross's proposition at the time was to use the heat generated by the sun to power a hot-air engine (specifically a "Stirling engine") that would then produce power with greater efficiency than a steam-powered engine, which remains the fossil fuel industry's typical power generator.

Jake managed to dig up an email address for Gross's company, and he sent them his resume and some pictures of his own solar prototype. He recalls chatting in the kitchen with his son one day shortly after. Together they had done some research on Gross and discovered one of his companies, eToys, had been worth $4 billion prior to the recession. The phone rang. Jokingly, Jake said to his son, "That's Bill Gross." But indeed, it was Gross on the phone, and after a short conversation, he invited Jake to fly to Los Angeles the next day to check out Idealab. Shortly thereafter, Jake became the 9th member of Gross's team.

Jake worked with companies founded through Idealab from 2003-2011, ultimately serving as Vice-President of Research & Development for eSolar. eSolar focused on Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), and they sought to develop a low-cost model that might be easily replicated in the sunniest places around the world (the Southwest U.S. being the closest). While eSolar closed down somewhat mysteriously in 2017, Bill Gross apparently kept the CSP dream alive through his company Heliogen. As this part-promotional, part-informational 2021 video about Heliogen demonstrates:

The Future of Solar-Hydrogen Farming

Jake's still intent on putting the principles of Concentrated Solar Power into action in his own backyard. He's relocated the platform for his solar power-tower (pictured above in Utah) to his backyard in Wonder Valley. The working acronym he's developed as a metric for his system's sustainability is SWARTH--Semi-Weatherable Auto-Refurbishable-Heliostat-Theory. For example, he's chosen aluminum as the material for trusses and frame because it's self-sealing and thus ideally without wear in a desert climate. Compare the steel tower in the photos below with the support structure constructed out of aluminum -- both are 30-years old, but the steel shows significant rust. Comparatively again, the material components of photovoltaic panels (PV) may deteriorate significantly over the course of 20-30 years under the blazing sun. Ultimately, Jake dreams of rolling out a solar-farm in Wonder Valley and a test facility, where interested parties and businesses can experiment with the thermal capacity his tower generates. His vision includes converting thermal energy into hydrogen power through thermochemical water splitting; thus he'd be 'farming' power that might be distributed locally.

Jake's working toward making that goal a reality as soon as possible. Effectively, he's worked out a one-man assembly-line on-site -- a press for mirrors/heliostats, various jigs to help shape and cut aluminum trusses to hold and manipulate the heliostats, and the hardware for control motor boxes (of which there are actually 12 different varieties). He's still tinkering with robots that could daily tend to the mirrors -- as it gets pretty unbearably hot in Wonder Valley during the dog days of summer (120+ F), but he admits that the robots aren't essential for getting the power-tower up and running.

What he does require is investment capital to support his next steps. He still needs to construct 120 trusses, including motors, mirrors, and wiring control boards. He plans to reopen his company North American Sun (nasunco.com) on May 1st, 2025 (with a nod to International Workers' Day), and he has several proposals for potential investors. For instance, invest $400 for a single truss (which supports 4-mirrors), and once the tower's running, you might expect $200/year in return. Alternately, if investors are interested in participating more fully in the process, they could pay $200 for the materials and help Jake construct the truss on-site. Altogether, 120-trusses holding 480-mirror/heliostats will cost ~$48k. Jake's open to exploring a horizontal model for the tower where 'worker-owners' maintain the tower and reap its benefits.

Wanting More Detail?

If you're curious to grasp at nitty-gritty details, you can read Jake's full Powerpoint presentation on his website here. If you’d like to be in touch with him directly, find his contact here: https://nasunco.com/contact/.

(Originally Published 3-4-25 // Edited September, 2025)