During Jimmy Carter’s presidency –– on March 28, 1979 –– one of the two nuclear reactors at the Three Mile Island nuclear complex near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania partially melted down. Within days anti-nuclear protests had spread across the country. It provided an opening to talk about then-alternative energy sources, like solar power.
On May 6, between 65,000 and 125,000 people came to Washington DC to protest. President Jimmy Carter declined to address the rally, but he did invite 7 of its leaders to the White House to get “first-hand information” about their position and their demands. The meeting took place on May 9th. Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger accompanied Carter.
Among the invited leaders were Donald Ross, the May 6th Coalition Head Coordinator and Harriet Barlow, Administrative Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Ross made the case against nuclear power. Harriet, and others made the case for solar.
Carter listened respectfully. He was supportive of nuclear energy and had both the credentials and the experience to justify such support. In New York he took graduate work at Union College in reactor technology and nuclear physics and served as senior engineering officer for the nuclear plant aboard the USS Seawolf, the Navy’s second nuclear sub.
But while Carter’s experience and understanding of nuclear energy led to his support even after the near meltdown of one of Three Mile Island’s reactors, it also led him to understand the military risk involved in promoting nuclear energy. A few months after taking office, he told Americans, “The benefits of nuclear power are thus very real and practical. But a serious risk accompanies worldwide use of nuclear power-the risk that components of the nuclear power process will be turned to providing atomic weapons.”
He decided to “defer indefinitely the commercial reprocessing and recycling of the plutonium produced in the US nuclear power programs.” Later in 1977 he vetoed funding for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor project. And when Congress persisted in keeping the project alive, he publicly condemned the action as, “an assault on our attempts to control the spread of dangerous nuclear materials. It marches our nuclear policy in exactly the wrong direction. … This is no time to change America into a plutonium society.”
Immediately after the Three Mile Island accident, Carter established a high-level commission to investigate its causes. That fall, Carter adopted the recommendation of the Commission’s scathing report to temporarily halt licenses for new nuclear power plants. But he also reflected, “As I’ve said before, in this country nuclear power is an energy source of last resort…(But) (w)e do not have the luxury of abandoning nuclear power or imposing a lengthy moratorium on its further use.” He needed more information about alternatives.
Jimmy Carter and Solar Energy
Carter’s appointment of Schlesinger as Secretary of Energy came as a huge disappointment to the small but rapidly growing number of advocates for renewable energy. Schlesinger had been Secretary of Defense under Ford. Under Nixon, Schlesinger had chaired the Atomic Energy Commission and undoubtedly influenced Nixon’s decision to make a massive increase in nuclear power the centerpiece of his Project Independence initiative. Launched after the 1973 OPEC boycott of countries that supported Israel in the Arab-Israeli War quadrupled the price of oil, the initiative envisioned 1,000 nuclear plants by the year 2000. Despite opportunity to encourage energy independence, Schlesinger was no fan of solar energy.
Upon the recommendation of Schlesinger, Carter’s first budget asked Congress to provide $10 million less for solar energy programs than had been requested by the Ford administration. A dismayed Denis Hayes, coordinator of the first Earth Day told the Washington Post that the budget is “not even the financial equivalent of one small weapons system.” Congress instead increased DOE’s solar budget authorization substantially.
Within a year of his taking office, President Carter announced an inter-agency committee headed by Schlesinger. The Washington Post reported, “The formal domestic policy review of the government’s solar programs is expected to relieve some of the mounting political fire from critics who maintain there is a widening split between what the White House says and what the Energy Department has done to boost solar energy. Despite President Carter’s public statements in support of solar energy and symbolic gestures such as reviewing the inaugural parade in a solar-heated enclosure, solar advocates in Congress and elsewhere have criticized Schlesinger for providing scant funding for government-sponsored solar research and development.”
Schlesinger’s view of solar wasn’t for lack of evidence of its benefits. Early in 1975, when Schlesinger was Secretary of Defense, I visited him in his office. ILSR had just published The Dawning of Solar Cells, an argument for governments to directly purchase solar arrays to increase the scale of manufacturing and thus decrease the cost of production. At the meeting I suggested DOD use for solar the same massive purchasing strategy it had used to aggressively drive down the cost of two key semiconductor products: the transistor and the integrated circuit. Schlesinger demurred. Solar cells, the Secretary of Defense insisted, have “no military applications.” John J. Bennett, Acting Assistant Secretary for Logistics explained that the DOD did have a few very small demonstrations but, “Unlike transistors, solar cells do not afford a unique capacity except in a very limited number of special applications such as satellites.”
Bennett was right. And he was wrong. He was right that solar cells were not like transistors and could not count on the same cost reduction derived from packing more and more components in a given space. But he was wrong because the history of many industries indicated that a steady increase in production led to a learning curve that sharply reduced costs. Indeed, a later study found that from 1981 to 2005, every doubling in solar module production decreased the cost by 20 percent.
Seeing is Believing
ILSR saw the potential firsthand. In 1973 and 1974 several U.S. companies began producing solar cells for terrestrial applications. The biggest was Solarex, located about a half hour driving time from ILSR’s offices in D.C. That proximity gave ILSR staff the opportunity to see a first-generation solar cell “factory”. In one of my first visits, Joseph Lindmayer, the far-seeing Hungarian physicist who started the company, brought me downstairs to visit his one-room manufacturing facility. Everything was done by hand. It was clear that production costs would decline dramatically as the production process matured. At the time annual production of the entire U.S. solar electric industry could generate only enough electricity to power a handful of homes.
We needed people to see solar to understand its potential, and that was a problem. For the first two decades, solar cells were used in remote locations. One manufacturer lamented, “The first national exposure for solar cells occurred when we installed some on a toilet facility in Yellowstone National Park.”
One ILSR funder was convinced that seeing is believing. The Stern Fund rejected our proposal in 1976, but a similar proposal received a different response when I returned the following year with a small plastic cube with a solar cell on top and a propeller on the side. At the meeting I placed it on the table and opened the curtains. The propeller began to turn. We received the grant.
Solar Energy is Democratic
In a July 1977 Science article Allen Hammond and William D. Mertz explained, “A point about solar energy that government planners seem to have trouble grasping is that it is fundamentally different from other energy sources. Solar energy is democratic.”
That same year one of the most comprehensive examinations of the impact of solar cells by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) concluded that if costs continued to drop, “a 30 year trend toward central power production would be reversed…It would also challenge the premise on which existing regulatory law is founded that because of economies of scale, utility companies are ‘natural monopolies’ and competition should be replaced by regulation to protect the public interest.”
In 1978, in testimony before Congress, Lindmayer explained, “The many letters we have received at Solarex and the many audiences we’ve addressed have convinced us that a major motivation for the growing popular support of solar energy is the fact that it can be controlled by individuals and local communities.”
Carter’s Administration Comes Around, But Not Entirely
Under Jimmy Carter the federal government did directly purchase solar cells, but those purchases were intended to identify producers and impose durability standards, not to directly expand production. Manufacturers welcomed the government’s purchasing initiatives, but Dick Weingarner of Optical Coating Laboratories summed up the general feeling of his business colleague, “It is good to see ERDA (the predecessor to the Department of Energy) involved in direct buying but this kind of national program will not bring the price down. Production levels need to be significantly higher before prices will fall significantly.” And industry needed to know not only that the federal government was willing to spend more, but that it was willing to commit to a long-term purchasing schedule.
When the government did spend money on solar energy it favored applications that lent themselves to utility scale operation. Hammond and Metz observed, “Despite the diffuse nature of the resource, the research program has emphasized large central stations to produce solar electricity in some distant future and has largely ignored small solar devices for producing on-site power.” The largest allotment of ERDA funds and staff for solar went to build a power tower, a system with a boiler on a high tower heated by sunlight reflected from a field of thousands of sun-following mirrors.
Solar power towers were not the most centralized federal vision for solar energy. That was the solar power satellite (SPS) system. In 1973, the same year the first solar cells were made for terrestrial applications, Peter Glaser was granted a U.S. patent (number 3,781,647) for his method of transmitting power from a satellite to earth. NASA signed a contract with Arthur D. Little, where Glaser was Vice President, to lead four other companies in a broader study in 1974. Between 1978 and 1986, the Department of Energy and NASA spent $50 million to explore the concept. In a report to the OTA in 1980, ILSR compared the SPS to rooftop solar and found the latter cheaper, more quickly deployable at massive scale, and incomparably better in terms of its impact on households, communities and governance.
Secretary Schlesinger finally came around, recommending the federal government spend $2.5 billion over several years, beginning in 1981, to stimulate the development of solar energy. At the end of July1979 he announced the appointment of Denis Hayes as head of the Solar Energy Research Institute and Congress appropriated sufficient money to make that Institute one of the largest such institutions in the world.
Some veteran solar advocates were still disappointed. In an April 1980 article for the Christian Science Monitor, Richard Munson, coordinator of the Solar Lobby noted that the increased budget largely consisted of tax incentives and loan programs not yet enacted by Congress. More concretely, the budget effectively ended the federal program of purchasing solar cells.
However, solar advocates were cheered by one major development.
On June 20, 1979, a month after our meeting at the White House, Carter spoke at the formal unveiling of the White House solar hot water system. The system itself was a result of a letter written by Ken Bossong then of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Shortly after Carter took office Ken sent a letter to the White House urging the President to install solar hot water heating on the White House “to dramatize both the need and potential for solar energy utilization.” The letter was cosigned by Alan Okagaki of the Center, Harriet Barlow, then with Rural America, David Morris of ILSR, and Craig Decker of New England Technology Network. Bossong made the same argument in a letter to the editor in the Washington Post. It caught the eye of people in the White House, which led President Carter to ask for a feasibility study and eventually, the solar installation.
While the market for rooftop solar electric was years from gaining traction, the market for rooftop solar heating was already alive and growing. In 1974, 5,000 solar hot water systems were installed. By 1980 there were over 50,000.
Ronald Reagan, the End of US Leadership, and the Rise of China
In January 1981 Ronald Reagan became President. During his campaign he had promised to abolish the Department of Energy and slash funding for renewables. He was unable to do the former but was highly successful in doing the latter. He drastically increased the proportion of the DOE budget that went to designing, testing and producing nuclear weapons, from 32 percent to 70 percent. And shrank by 70 percent the amount Carter had requested for solar in 1981 by 70 percent, and effectively zeroed out solar energy from federal budget in 1983. In June 2, 1981, almost exactly 2 years after he was hired to head up SERI, Denis Hayes was fired. Joseph Lindmayer told the Washington Post that investors were backing out of his company because the government had “decided to go nuclear…It’s tough to have the administration saying there is no need for alternative energy.”
Ronald Reagan presidency also coincided with the worst economic recession in the US since the early 1930s, precipitated by a severe tightening of credit engineered by the Federal Reserve to dampen inflation largely caused by rapid increases in oil prices. The near depression in the United States spawned the first contraction in worldwide trade since 1931. As economies shriveled, the price of oil plummeted from a high of $36 barrel when Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981 to below $10 per barrel in 1986.
For Ronald Reagan and for the nation, if there had ever been an energy crisis that required government intervention, it was over.
In 1986 Ronald Reagan removed the solar system Jimmy Carter had unveiled in 1979. It had operated flawlessly for 7 years. Twenty years later a couple of the panels were found. One was driven by two students and in their biofueled car, they drove the panels to the Carter Library in Atlanta.
Ronald Reagan relinquished the US lead in solar energy. At the beginning of his term, the US produced the vast majority of solar panels in the world. By the time he left office our share had fallen to about 30 percent. By 2005 it was under 10 percent. In the 1980s, Japan seized the world lead in solar with U.S. solar company patents and favorable policy. Japan, often with patents obtained from US solar companies, developed its own long-term program to encourage solar. Germany took over in the mid 2000s, and the solar boom induced by its policies helped further reduce the cost of solar panels.
Enter China. China had been producing solar cells to power satellites since the 1970s but as late as 2003 it was producing less than 2 percent of the world’s solar hardware. Five years later it was producing more than any other country. By 2013 China had become not only the world’s largest producer of solar cells but its largest customer.
Today China controls at least 75 percent of every single key stage of solar photovoltaic panel. In the first half of 2022, the country invested $41 billion in solar, a 173 percent increase from the year before.
Today China accounts for 36 percent of worldwide solar demand and has 84 percent of solar panel manufacturing capacity. North America consumes 18 percent of the solar panels and has 3 percent of manufacturing capacity. For Europe the percentages are 17 and 3 respectively. But the most important legacy of China’s investment was the plummeting cost of solar panels.
Can We Put Energy Democracy Back on the Policy Table?
U.S. utilities took notice. A 2013 report from the Edison Electric Institute, the electric utilities’ trade association noted that there were 200,000 distributed solar customers in the United States as of 2011 but that small number belied the threat. The combination of price reductions in solar coupled with price increases by utilities, EEI warned, meant “the threat to the utility model from disruptive forces is now increasingly viable.” It predicted that a third of the utility market would find solar electric competitive by 2017. It noted the public policies that encouraged rooftop solar, like net metering, were in effect in 43 states and the District of Columbia.
Electric utilities began a concerted, coordinated effort to roll back rooftop solar. In several states households with the ability to generate their own renewable energy were penalized with higher rates. In 2023, California drastically reduced its incentives for rooftop solar, decimating its domestic market. Meanwhile support for utility scale solar expanded. Indeed, even while California is turning its back on decentralized solar, it is strongly supporting centralized facilities, like one covering 3200 acres that generates about 580 MW, generating sufficient electricity to power 160,000 homes. A facility to open in 2023 or 2024 in Nevada is even larger, encompassing 7100 acres on federal land. Today energy democracy is an after-thought of solar policy.
Even the idea of space based solar arrays has been revived. NASA and European energy agencies have major research programs. In January 2023 a space power prototype was launched and demonstrated for the first time, the ability to wirelessly transmit power in space and to beam detectable power to Earth for the first time.
In 1979, when Jimmy Carter dedicated the White House solar hot water array he told those attending, “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.” In 2017, Carter again built a solar array, this time generating electricity on his own fields in Plains, Georgia. It provided about 50 percent of the entire town’s electricity, population 600.
Carter’s goal was for the country to achieve at least 14 percent renewable electricity by 2000. In 2023 that goal was reached, with solar and wind accounting for about 15 percent. For solar energy, about 15 percent of its production comes from small-scale projects, like those on rooftops of homes and businesses. But the vast majority of the equipment that enabled the generation of solar energy came from China.
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act envisioned a major restoration of domestic clean energy manufacturing, for solar panels but also batteries and electric vehicles, but it makes me ponder the road not taken. Would we have needed to re-shore clean energy factories if the Democrats had continued to hold the White House and Congress in 1980? Would the solar boom have come, but twenty years earlier?
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