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Can we figure out a way to capture solar power for later delivery in time to head off the coming crisis?

It's feasible, said Joseph Simmons, co-director of the Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy at the University of Arizona. "We may be too late to avoid the runaway carbon dioxide problem," said Simmons, "but certainly we can develop these technologies before we start running out of fossil fuel."

UA scientist Roger Angel says we can stop using fossil fuels altogether. The Southwest should generate all the nation's power with vast solar arrays whose power would be stored behind hydroelectric levees, he said.

Part of the power produced during the day by solar arrays would be used to pump water from sources such as Lake Mead on the Arizona-Nevada border to a man-made lake at higher altitude, fronted by a wide bank of hydroelectric turbines.

In the Southwest, "there is enough sunshine on a couple hundred miles square to feed the whole nation," Angel said.

Angel, who started the UA lab that casts mirrors for telescopes, earned appointment as a regents' professor at the UA and induction into the National Academy of Science for his work in optics.

He's now dedicated to ending global warming. "I've turned my life over to thinking about that problem," he said.

Angel already has proposed an emergency space launch of sunshades to cut the sun's warming rays and is now working on the problem of how to generate all of our energy needs from the sun.

It begins with his work on focusing sunshine on solar cells, using mirrors to increase the intensity of sunlight on a solar cell by a magnitude of 1,000. The technology should have the benefit of making solar components more cost-effective, he said.

Then there is the storage problem, which he thinks can be done on a large scale with lakes.

It's already done in the Netherlands, he said, where wind-generated power is shipped to Sweden, "where it's used to pump hydro plants backwards."

The next step is transmission, and Angel envisions a network of giant DC transmission lines that would feed the country from a wide swath of the Southwest deserts, Texas to California. It would take a commitment comparable to the building of the interstate highway system in the '50s, he said.

"Roger is right about that," said Simmons, but he doubts that the country is ready to sacrifice the areas needed to build the lakes and route the power lines.

Simmons, whose own research involves finding ways to improve the efficiency of more affordable, thin-film photovoltaics, said he envisions a variety of solutions to the solar puzzle and they don't all involve science.

Simmons and others plan to research a bond program developed in Berkeley, Calif., that pays the full cost of solar-electric generating systems for homes, and collects it back in yearly tax assessments for more than 20 years.

That has the potential to accelerate rooftop solar, Simmons said.

The Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy will coordinate research projects, seed "revolutionary ideas" and be an educational resource for policymakers and the community, he said.

The institute, formed this year, received its first funding Dec. 6, when the Arizona Board of Regents gave out $6.6 million in state income-tax money that had been set aside in the Technology and Research Initiative Fund.

Both the UA and Arizona State University will receive $1,050,000 the first year, $700,000 the second year and $800,000 in each of the next two years for solar research.