Document: A Solar Explosion [Downloadable PDF]
Authors: Bruce Baccei
Date: 1981
Notes: Presented at the AS/ISES Sixth Passive Solar Conference, Portland, OR, September 8-12, 1981
Task Number: 1122.20
Abstract: The Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) and the Department of Energy (DOE) Passive Solar Manufactured Buildings and Solar Home Builders Programs are developed much needed cost and performance data on solar buildings produced by large-volume home builders. These programs also serve as a model on how government can work with industry.

Inventing Green Thoughts:

“The SERI and DOE programs are useful for accelerating private industry’s rate of change,” begins A Solar Explosion. He’s answering a question that the Regan White House surely posed and that continues to permeate our discussions about energy today.

How, they must have asked, could government improve on what the “free market” decides? Knowing that the game was stacked against them, it must have seemed farcical to provide answers at all, but Baccei tries anyway.

He draws attention to two SERI programs, the Passive Solar Manufactured Buildings Program and the Solar Home Builders Program, saying that it is “particularly noteworthy that SERI and DOE have initiated two programs that work directly with the U.S. building industry and are proving to be widely popular and very successful.”

23 companies participated in the Manufactured Buildings Program. Baccei cites the director of research for the country’s largest producer of metal buildings saying, “Butler [Manufacturing] would still be doodling on the back of envelopes if it were not for this government program.”

Instead, Butler designed and built a prototype that used 70% less energy than its standard buildings. Despite the early success, the only postmortem conducted after the program’s end found that “only two of the manufacturers continued to offer designs based on experiences under the program.” This, despite the fact that 20-60% energy savings were achieved at incremental costs ranging from 0-20%. Tough economic times and “the programs ‘fits and starts’ resulting from budget cutbacks at DOE” appear to have contributed to the technical success but market failure of the program.

Baccei’s second success story is the Solar Home Builders Program. Nearly no information is available on the program, save Baccei’s account an article in the Christian Science Monitor that backs him up.

“Passive solar energy may finally be shaking its ’suburban chic’ image. It appears poised to leap out of the pages of Sunset magazine into the more mundane world of the tract home,” David Salisbury wrote.

His news peg was a pilot program that Baccei initiated in Denver with twelve builders. With SERI’s help, they directed 100,000 Denverites to 12 model solar homes. Over the 16-day exhibition, the builders sold 31 homes for $2.5 million and projected another 87 sales to bring the total to $6.3 million. Pretty decent numbers during an economic recession that rivals the one we’re in right now. Certainly evidence that the $150,000 program was working for the builders enrolled in it.

Still, the larger question of how much the government can do to drive techniques into the marketplace remained unanswered because Regan cut teh program’s budget before it could carry through on its plans.

“A debate is currently being waged in the United States about the appropriateness of government’s role in programs like those presented here. It has been suggested that energy conservation and renewable energy programs be stopped because private industry will respond on its own to rising energy prices,” he writes. “Although a response can be expected, time lags and appropriateness of responses remain a serious concern.”

In hindsight, we know that price upturns have rarely continued long enough for deeply ingrained corporate behaviors and expensive infrastructure to change. Many of the choices we made with cheap energy and no carbon constraints — building stock, automobile fleet, transportation infrastructure, power plants, The Grid — have momentum that will take decades of price signals to change.

Looking at the recent (and long-term, actually) history of energy in the United States, a coherent, socially-driven nuclear policy drove massive adoption of the technology, despite serious technical challenges and higher costs than the fossil fuel alternatives. Now, nuclear power generated in plants built long ago is seriously cheap, even if new plants are still likely to cost a bundle.

To take one example of how social decisions impact the cost of energy technology, think about financing. When a technology becomes what economist Steve Cohn calls an “official technology,” with de facto or explicit government backing, financing tends to get cheaper. That is to say, banks respond to the government’s wishes by making it relatively cheaper to borrow money to build a big plant. On a plant requiring hundreds of millions or bilions of dollars, the terms of the loans that the developer receives can make the difference in reaching that fuzzy/moving/imaginary line we call “grid parity.”

Baccei, for his part, is still around. He’s now head of emerging energy efficiency technologies at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. It’s not a stretch to say that it’s people like him who could tag green tech an official technology.

A Solar Explosion – 1981