June 19, 2012 |
Photo Credit: SasPartout/ Shutterstock.com
This story is not new. Today, solar energy is picking up momentum. But
despite the current numbers and the recent raves, the solar saga, and
that of renewable energy as a whole, has been going on for decades. It
is a history of false starts and stutter steps.
First, the good news. According to the Solar Energy Industries
Association (SEIA), 2011 showed record-breaking numbers for U.S. solar
installations. The industry's best year ever saw demand rise by 109
percent over the previous year. With tremendous incentives and benefits
for homeowners, and as prices continue to decline, the future looks
bright for this alternative energy source.
However a quick glance to the past throws harsh light on the fact that
we've been at this precipice before. In 1978, the White House Council on
Environmental Quality issued this glowing statement: "Our conclusion is
that with a strong national commitment to accelerated solar development
and use, it should be possible to derive a quarter of U.S. energy from
solar by the year 2000. For the year 2020 and beyond, it is now possible
to speak hopefully, and unblushingly, of the United States becoming a
solar society."
The key words here being "
strong national commitment,"
because just as timber, coal, oil, gas, and nuclear received enormously
strong federal support, solar needs the same kind of government
backing, which as of yet, the sector has not seen. The statement should
instead read,
We could become a solar society, if only we wanted to become a solar society.
The process of generating electricity directly from sunlight, known as
photovoltaic
(PV) effect was first observed in Paris by 19-year-old Alexandre Edmund
Becquerel in 1839. Albert Einstein won his only Noble Prize for his
discovery of the law of photoelectric effect, which was an integral part
of future photovoltaic technology. After groundbreaking PV research at
Bell Labs in the1950s, it was finally in the '70s, when a combination of
American spirit and ingenuity met simple necessity to bring modern
solar technologies to the forefront as a power source. The trigger was
the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 and 1974. Out of this crisis, came the
Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, and then formation of
Energy Research and Development Administration,
(ERDA), which would in later years become the Department of Energy. The
goal of ERDA, which had an initial budget of $4.3 billion, was to bring
together all the efforts devoted to energy research and development,
including solar, under one umbrella. Or in the law's wording to use "all
energy sources to meet the needs of present and future generations...
to make the nation self-sufficient in energy."
Despite the initiatives, high oil prices and fuel shortages continued to plague the United States throughout the '70s.
Deadly Cold
January 1977. Nationwide, factories were shutting down and workers were
being laid off. The cause was harsh winter temperatures and a country
running out of fuel. The human toll of the oil and natural gas shortage
and brutal weather was coming to bear. A newly elected president spoke
of a "
permanent, very serious energy shortage."
In the eastern states it was the coldest winter on record in
almost a century. Gas companies such as
Consolidated Edison Company
were shutting off supplies to customers just as the Arctic air
plummeted the mercury lower and forced demand higher. Temperatures on
the streets of New York City vacillated between 1 below and 12 degrees
above Fahrenheit. At welfare hotels across New York City, tenants (some
of whom ended up
perishing)
were forced to go without heat for weeks at a time due to unpaid bills
on their part or on behalf of absentee landlords, many of whom were
disinclined to make necessary repairs even if the bills were paid.
New York City's Central Complaint Bureau noted that it had received the
highest total of calls, more than 10,000 a day, reporting weather
related emergencies. By month's end New York, along with New Jersey, had
declared a state of emergency due to the weather and natural gas
shortage. 1,319 New York gas-heated schools were ordered
closed
for a week. In New Jersey, the governor ordered heat turned down to 60
degrees at night and warned that non-compliance could lead to
residential natural gas cut-offs.
Energy concerns grabbed the nation's attention. Consumption was up, oil
from abroad was iffy and gas production domestically was down. There
was uncertainty whether continued gas drilling would even be able keep
up with America's appetite for the fuel. The nation had become addicted
to "natural gas as a
cheap power source."
Moral Equivalent to War
By spring, the air had warmed, but President Jimmy Carter had no
choice, things had to change. On April 18, Carter took to the Oval
Office to speak to the nation on live television. He pulled no punches.
"Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem
unprecedented in our history."
The energy crisis was only going to get worse if not addressed, as the
demand was increasing faster than the supply. He called the situation
worse than the gas lines of '73. At the core of the problem was the
United States, in Carter's words, "the most wasteful nation on earth."
"We waste more energy than we import," he said. It was quite possibly
the bleakest presidential speech in history. But Carter did not waver,
he continued talking of "national catastrophe," "embargoes and loss of
freedom, of sovereignty," and if we were lucky, of "drifting along for a
few more years." Finally he laid it all on the line. "This difficult
effort will be the 'moral equivalent of war' except that we will be
uniting our efforts to build and not destroy."
But Carter left the door open for every American to make a difference.
What the newly elected 39th president was asking for was unselfishness
and shared sacrifice -- tricky territory indeed. He even suggested the
dreaded c-word --- c
onservation. The ugly word meant altering
citizens' lifestyles, and historically, whether it's with anti-smoking
campaigns or eating less sugary foods, such amendments are never going
to be popular. War was a comparatively easy sell. Carter was doomed by
common sense.
His plight was not lost on reporters. Hedrick Smith of the
New York Times
described "the political gamble inherent in preaching sacrifices to a
nation of consumers in peacetime." Americans did not want to hear about
taxes on high-gas luxury cars, such as when Carter decreed that
"Citizens who insist on driving large, unnecessarily powerful cars must
expect to pay more for that luxury." In fact, at the time of Carter's
energy speech, in an ode to our current "debate" over global warming,
national polls showed that half of the public thought the energy crisis
was "artificially created."
The nuts and bolts of his speech, besides the "strict conservation,"
called for a renewed use of coal and the development of permanent
renewable energy sources. His goal for solar energy was to have it power
2.5 million homes by 1985. Carter had been touting solar since his
inauguration in January, when four solar heating units were set up at
the receiving stand on the White House North Lawn to keep the Commander
in Chief and his entourage warm while viewing the parade. Granted, solar
was but a part of a larger strategy. Nevertheless, solar was in the
game, and it was a start.
SERI
In May of 1978, following up on his success as organizer of the
inaugural Earth Day in 1970, Denis Hayes, a senior researcher for
Worldwatch Institute, was part of a group to bring together Sun Day, an
internationally scoped event aiming to educate the public and the policy
makers that the technology to go solar was available. A day of fairs
and exhibitions were scheduled to take place in 28 different countries,
and officially kicked off at the United Nations Plaza in New York with a
ceremony titled "The Dawning of the Solar Age." President Carter used
the spotlight to announce a
$100 million increase in money devoted to solar and renewable projects.
A little more than a year later, Hayes would move on to become director
of the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), which had been
established in 1974 and became operational in July of 1977 in Golden,
Colorado. (In 1991, SERI would become the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory.) Hayes was a man ahead of the game and talked to reporters
nearly 35 years ago about the "profound and irreversible alterations of
global climate," and that we were already "behind schedule" for "solar
transition."
Hayes remembers the early days of SERI as being "built with enormous
enthusiasm," as an "analytical and research center, a place where policy
formulation could take place in the field." At the time, the term
"solar" was a category-head for a bundle of renewables including wind,
biofuels and ocean thermal electric. Staffed with the finest minds in
the country, including Noble Prize-winners, the institute's atmosphere
was one of prestige, and comparable to the National Institutes of Health
and not unlike the early days of NASA. It didn't take long before
researchers at SERI believed that photovoltaic technologies could make
substantial contributions toward our energy problems. Hopes at SERI were
high. They believed they could solve America's energy problem.
In 1970, solar funding was a mere $75,000. By 1977, it had increased to
$261 million. A year later, in 1978, subsidies were aimed towards
renewables for the first time, including a
tax credit
for residential installations of solar. Still, the numbers paled in
comparison to the dollars handed out to the other energy sectors,
including the $787 million spent on nuclear in 1977.
At the same time other nations were coming to the same conclusion
regarding the necessity of alternative sources of energy. Even
Saudi Arabia,
the world's largest oil producer, was on board, as the nation announced
in 1977 it was building the world's largest solar heating system.
"We had, in the Carter years, a well-developed plan to get 20 percent
of nation's energy from renewable resources by the year 2000," Hayes
says, and is confident they'd have made their mark if a series of
policies had been enacted. "Unfortunately," Hayes says, "none of those
policies were ever implemented."
Hayes identifies the moment when Carter embraced the 20 percent-call,
over quite a few objections, as "the high point of solar energy in the
United States."
Two Presidents, One Bad Idea
Energy independence is something every president campaigns on. Moving
into the 1980s, the one simple truth was that the United States didn't
want to ever be in a situation of scarcity again, or have to rely on
foreign sources of energy. Yet in all of the government's brilliance, it
was decided to gut the very agency that might have actually delivered
the promise of energy independence -- SERI.
In November 1980, America voted out Jimmy Carter, and in came Ronald
Reagan. (Reagan even took the opportunity of their October 1980 debate
to take a poke at Carter's conservation pleas: "He [Carter] has then
accused the people of living too well and that we must share in
scarcity, we must sacrifice and get used to doing with less.")
For Denis Hayes the transition of administrations was a time of great
uncertainty. The biggest question was whom the president would choose as
the Secretary of Energy. As a possible sign of Reagan's interest, or
lack thereof, in the field of energy, this would be the last cabinet
position he'd get around to selecting. As Hayes recalls, "he chose,
apparently by throwing a dart at the wall, a guy named Jim Edwards, the
former governor of South Carolina, a dentist by profession, to be
Secretary of Energy." Edwards would replace Charles Duncan Jr., a former
president of Coca-Cola.
Inside the halls of the Solar Institute in Golden, Colorado, the irony
of a dentist replacing a soft drink executive was not lost on the
aforementioned group of Noble-caliber scientists. Says Hayes; "It
suggests something about the feeling of whether or not somebody needs to
know anything about a fairly complicated field before you give them the
[department's] highest office in the land." A former dentist was now
calling the shots on whether the experiments and research undertaken by
SERI's staff of distinguished scientists would ever see the light of
day.
By June 1981, Dennis Hayes was out of a job; along with
370 of the gifted scientists
and activists he had recruited. Reagan's distaste for all things solar
was never more evident than by his dismantling of the solar panels
Carter had placed atop the White House roof, but that display was only
the beginning as the budget for solar development, along with subsidies
and tax credits for the industry were slashed. With federal backing
virtually wiped out overnight, young solar companies began to collapse
and the industry as a whole was on the ropes.
Reducing the nation's reliance on foreign oil and fossil fuels, in
general, would have seemed to have been in the U.S.'s interests. In
order for this to happen, scientists and renewable advocates pushed for
the same federal backing that all other energy sources received in their
years of infancy, going all the way back to timber. Instead, the Reagan
administration chose to double-down on fossil fuels and keep heaping
enormous amounts of taxpayers' money in this direction. As an
alternative to foreign oil, the new administration put its support
behind, not renewables, but synthetic fuels.
The
Synthetic Fuel Corporation
was a dirty alternative to dirty energy. There is perhaps no better
example of misplaced taxpayer money than the decision to invest in
synfuels, which is the result of turning all the dirty shit we can find;
shale oil, tar sands oil, coal and lignite into a substitute for
gasoline. Two presidential administrations, one on each side of the
political line, put their support behind synfuels. From an original
price tag of $88 billion, the Synthetic Fuel Corporation was eventually
awarded $20 billion. Money that, despite the corporation's president
taking home $135,000 a year, which made him the second highest paid
federal employee, behind only Reagan, the corporation struggled to come
up with ways to spend the money, taking three years to throw a nickel
behind a single project. The technology for synfuels wasn't even new,
having been shopped around two other times in American history, in the
'20s and the '50s.
In comparison, Hayes' Solar Institute budget
spiraled
from $124 million in 1980 to $59 million in 1982. Speaking of the $88
billion proposed for synfuels, Hayes says such a commitment to solar
would have been "transformational," but $20 billion would have certainly
done the trick. Hayes says that if the United States had put together a
five- or 10-year plan for solar and stood behind it with those kind of
dollars and just let the industry develop, "We'd be in very different
shape than we're in today." But instead, the government supported
synfuels, which Hayes calls a fiasco. "We spent, in the end, $18-20
billion on these things for just a couple of kettles full of oil."
In 1985, tax credits for solar homes were not renewed. The solar
industry itself, once a billion-dollar business, had barely a pulse. Oil
prices were at rock bottom, and so alternative energy was no longer a
priority. Shortsightedness prevailed. The Reagan administration
systematically cut all things renewable, while the budget for nuclear
rose substantially.
Hayes probably summed up the backwardness of the U.S. energy policy best when he penned an
op-ed for the
New York Times
in 1981, with the hopes of creating as big a splash as he could amidst
his forced resignation in 1981. He wrote, "If the oil industry cannot
thrive today without subsidies, who can?"
Anti-government spending advocates may applaud the decision to cut
funding for renewables, but the reality is that spending and subsidies
towards energy has never wavered -- federal dollars were simply directed
at the fossil fuel industry instead of renewables. Or put another way,
taxpayers are now subsidizing oil and gas profits, instead of the
technology needed to spearhead the energy sources of the future. Take
away the oil and gas subsidies, and the industry will still turn
enormous profits. Take away renewables' funding, and more likely than
not these companies fold.
According to a March 2012 study done by the Congressional Research
Service, analysis shows that since the inception of the Department of
Energy in 1978, 62.3 percent of energy technology funding went to
nuclear and fossil fuels, 16.5 percent to renewables, while 14.7 was
directed to conservation, and 6.6 to electric. Going back further and
expanding the numbers from 1948 to 2012, funding for fossil and nuclear
goes up to 74 percent, while renewables took in 12 percent during that
same period.
Level Playing Field
It is impossible to speak about solar energy today without getting into
Solyndra's 2011 bankruptcy after receiving a $535 million loan
guarantee from the federal government. Bring up the name Solyndra in
some corners and you'll be required to give witness to forced guffaws
from the uninformed, or worse yet, plain old contrived outrage. The
sight of Americans rooting and applauding the demise of an American
company whose business was geared to bring the country clean, homegrown
energy defies logic. Speaking to those within the solar community,
they'll plainly admit the loan was a bad investment, but they're also
quick to point out that such an investment is a minuscule piece of the
overall energy pie.
Such misperceptions motivated Nancy Pfund, a managing partner at Double
Bottom Line Venture Capital (DBL Investors) to undertake the grueling
study of U.S. energy subsidies for her
report,
"What Would Jefferson Do? The Historical Role of Federal Subsidies in
Shaping America's Energy Future." Pfund says a growing frustration on
her part regarding the politics around subsidies motivated her study,
which she believes is the first to quantify "how the current federal
commitment of renewables compares to support for earlier energy
transitions."
At the conclusion of her study, Pfund says, "I was surprised at how
much more support oil, gas, and nuclear received in their earlier days
than renewables has received, because if you just read the popular press
you'd think just the opposite. There is a lot of hue and cry about how
renewables are being subsidized but when you actually look at the
numbers it's a fraction of what oil and gas and nuclear received." Not
to mention she adds, "these are gifts that keep on giving." Which leads
to the question, why are we still subsidizing a 100-year-old industry,
when the initial impetus for such action was to help launch these
industries. Is there any doubt that they are now secure?
A look at some of Pfund's numbers shows that the average for annual
energy subsidies were as follows: (adjusted for inflation) oil and gas
(1918-2009), $4.86 billion per year; nuclear (1947-1999), $3.50 billion
per year; renewables (1994-2009), $0.37 billion per year.
However, what's most noticeable is the federal support given to the
different energy sectors during their infancies. Pfund writes: "There is
a striking divergence in early federal incentives. For example, federal
support for the nuclear industry overwhelms other subsidies as a
percentage of federal budget, but equally striking is the support for
oil and gas which was at least 25% higher than renewables, and in the
most extreme years 10 times as great."
Pfund found that "Every great expansion of the U.S. economy can be
linked with the discovery of a new energy source." And today federal
support for energy innovation is much lower than at the same correlating
juncture in the development of timber, coal, oil, gas, and nuclear.
Simply put, the playing field is not level. "Subsidies exist for all
energy sources," Pfund says. "So when people talk about yanking the wind
production tax credit or in 2016 the investment tax credit for solar, I
hope that people will think twice about that. It doesn't have to be an
ITC, but without some type of continuation of financial incentives until
the costs come down to a point where they don't need them, you're going
to create this boom and bust. You're going to draw dollars away from
renewables right at the point when they're actually about to make a big
dent on our energy profile."
State of Solar Today
Dave Llorens, CEO and co-founder of the solar power company One Block
Off The Grid (1BOG), sees solar energy as on the verge of tipping. 1BOG
is located two blocks from AT&T Park in downtown San Francisco but
its business scope is nationwide. Backed by New Enterprise Associates,
the same team behind Groupon, 1BOG gets groups of customers together in
an area and sets them up with a vetted contractor to install home solar
panels. 1BOG negotiates the best deals for solar panels in a particular
region, and through leasing provides savings while eliminating the big
upfront cost.
Llorens' customers are pleased to not only save money but to have a
clean source of energy. In fact, his team's biggest hurdle now is
convincing potential customers to help themselves. Says Llorens, "Some
people are like 'It sounds too good to be true. I can save money
immediately, it doesn't cost anything, and somebody guarantees it all?'"
Not only does 1BOG accomplish those things, but through the use of
satellite photos, the company can also give estimates over the phone.
"People just want to see the numbers -- we can do that for them," says
Llorens.
Llorens sees the overall market opportunity for solar in the United
States as gigantic. "It's just enormous," he says, "and it grows at a
breakneck pace every year." But again, it all comes back to support.
"One way to get regain the glory of our auto manufacturing days is clean
tech," says Llorens. "That's what this country does better at than any
other country, innovating and selling those products around the globe.
But that can't be done without immense backing and support to get it off
the ground. Even coal was subsidized to take the place of wood. Nobody
remembers that. Everything needs a push to get off the ground."
Llorens looks at solar's growth as somewhat unavoidable and foresees
the United States leading the way as a global leader in installations,
and with it, generating an immense amount of business, jobs and
infrastructure. "Soon, I think that it will be impossible to ignore the
fact that solar makes you money. There's this iceberg of a mindset, this
paradigm, where people think it's for rich environmentalists -- it's
not to save money. That's going to thaw pretty soon. People are going to
start to get it."
He compares the adoption of solar to that of central air conditioning,
and how suddenly homeowners went from wall units to central air. It was
simply a smarter way to cool the home and soon everyone had it. He sees
solar following the same adoption curve. Once a few people on the block
see it coming to the neighborhood, Llorens foresees a domino effect.
"When people see it for themselves, that it's just an unequivocally
better way to get power for your home," he says. "That it's cheaper,
more stable, and it's clean. Then it explodes."
There's no way to get around the fact that on Capital Hill and at the
state level today everything is about spending. But the focus is
incredibly narrow. Take Pennsylvania's penny-pinching new governor, Tom
Corbett, who has taken a hatchet to such things as education and social
service programs, yet will go out of the way to give the fossil fuel
industry an unnecessary break. Here's a headline from the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on June 4, 2012, "CORBETT SEEKING $1.675 BILLION TAX BREAK FOR SHELL."
On a global scale, as well, lunacy seems to rule the day, such as occurred in late May of this year when it was
reported in the
Guardian
that natural gas had been "rebranded as a green, low carbon source of
power" by the European Union, allowing the fossil fuel to inch in on the
billions of euros intended for renewables.
Since solar technology has become available, the obstacles have
remained the same year after year. Sadly the solutions are the same, as
well. It's simply a matter of failed leadership. Spend no more, if
that's the Holy Grail; merely spend the money in the right places.
Last year,
solar combined with wind, and geothermal to provide only 4.7 percent of
the nation's power, still a far cry from the 20 percent said to be
obtainable more than 30 years ago.
Aaron Skirboll is a freelance
journalist and the author of "The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven: How a Ragtag
Group of Fans Took the Fall for Major League Baseball."
No comments:
Post a Comment