I was very active in the solar energy movement in the 1970s. Active in the small sane fringe of that movement during this period. The fringe that wasn’t obsessed with the long-term potential of solar; that wasn’t obsessed with creating massive government bureaucracies to plan for near-term, mid-term, and long-term implementations of solar; the sane fringe that didn’t see solar’s real value in things like orbiting satellites collecting and beaming down power from space, giant solar farms in the desert, or ocean-based solar mega-energy producers. The sane fringe that focused instead on the sun’s ability to heat water.
My own solar promotional efforts were focused in Massachusetts, where I lived at the time. And if things in Washington were crazy in the post-Arab oil boycott, Jimmy Carter years, they were even nuttier in my own home state. In Boston, for example, promoting solar was put in charge of the city’s Consumer Protection Bureau — an approach, in terms of winning public confidence in the technology rather like placing the Department of Love under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Venereal Disease Prevention.
Boston, in fact, was one of the best possible places to enhance the most immediate uses of solar — water heating, which accounts for about 5 percent of all energy usage. Though Boston gets only about 70 percent of the radiant energy as, say, Yuma, Arizona, the economic value of solar water heating is related to the cost of the energy it replaces, and Boston’s heating costs back then were much, much higher than Yuma’s.
So here was this local government consumer protection bureau obsessed with protecting consumers from “solar fast-buck schemers” that no one but themselves had ever come upon, at a time when solar water haters were in fact one of the simplest, best understood, and widespread technologies around the world. Heck, he Romans used the sun to heat their own baths. The French were using soar water heaters in North Africa in the early 19th century, and by the end of that century there were many thousand such heaters in the American West, which only largely disappeared when very cheap natural gas became widely available. And still by the 1970s there were millions of such heaters operating in Japan, Israel, Australia, etc.
And there were these mad consumer protection types in Boston warning people not to buy such equipment before government guarantees were in place. Their numbskull, market numbing efforts were further advanced by the DOE in Washington which decided to hold a lottery that would provide a discount for solar water heater buyers, thus causing anyone who might actually buy one to wait on the off-chance of winning a lottery prize. Then the lottery itself was cancelled. And so solar faded badly from the Massachusetts scene, as it did for decades in much of the rest of the country.
But happily it’s back — big time. People now recognize solar as a supplement for other water heating systems when not a total replacement. At last. And with federal and more and more state tax benefits in place, these heaters are appearing all around the country in the tens of thousands of units.
Please people. Please, please, please. Don’t listen to the bureaucratic planning obsessives or the established fossil fuel interests when it comes to alternative energy sources like solar. These do NOT, repeat do NOT, have to replace fossil fuels. They are supplements. They are best used in a decentralized manner. They need not generate power (electricity a la photovoltaics). In conjunction with serious conservation efforts, they will not end the fossil fuels age any time soon. But they will help make us energy independent and save large chunks of the natural environment.
Let the decades-long idiocy when it came to solar water heating, and its present market reanimation, be your guide here.