Congressional treatment of solar energy hasn’t exactly been charitable, but it has been funny sometimes.

In 1963, Polykarp Kusch, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, went before a Senate subcommittee on space and aeronautics. He was testifying against the form and scale of the American space program. The scientific objectives, he told them, were “limited” — and that they were being pursued with “a certain flamboyance, a mood of haste” which was not “the mark of first-class scientific research.”

As if to make his case that other scientific research was being neglected because of manned moon fever, Senator Margaret Smith, reflecting on newspaper articles that had foreshadowed the Soviet launch of Sputnik, asked for Kusch’s opinion on a rumored Russian plan. Namely, she wanted to know what he thought about a newspaper article that described “a power station on the moon which could beam electricity to the earth in the form of a thin ray of light energy.” And, she added, “I just read somewhere in a book on space that only one two-hundred-thousandths of the energy of the sun gets to the Earth, and very little of that is utilized.”

Finally, the Chairman of the committee, New Mexico’s Clinton Anderson, who was reading Smith’s written question, concluded, “Do you have any interest in this powerplant?” This is the exchange that followed:

Dr. Kusch: I am sorry, it would take me more time than I have at my disposal now.
The Chairman: Would you send me a comment?
Dr. Kusch: Yes I would be delighted to do so. May I make a brief comment nevertheless?
The Chairman: Surely.
Dr. Kusch: About solar energy. I am much concerned with my great-great-great-great-grandchildren. That is, I would like to see humanity survive for millenia. A concern with the continuity of man is what being a human being is all about. We are obviously going to run out of fossil fuels. They are not going to last forever. Even if one talks about sufficient coal resources for 2,000 years, they are not going to last forever… I would believe it to be a significant national objective to utilize solar energy as it strikes the surface of the earth, either through biological processes, or something that physicists or chemists might dream of. I don’t know just what one might do, but at least it is a thinkable enterprise to utilize energy falling on the surface of the earth more efficiently for commercial distribution. It strikes a warm note.

Certainly, regular terrestrial solar energy was a more “thinkable” proposition than building a solar power plant on the moon and then beaming that energy back to the Earth. In the comment Kusch submitted later, he made this clear.

The solar energy which arrives on a specified area of the moon is about twice as great as that which arrives on the same area of the earth’s surface because there is some absorption of energy by the earth’s atmosphere. The process of converting solar energy to electrical energy, and, in turn, converting this to either a light beam or a radio beam, would result in considerable loss of useful energy. The transmission to the earth and the reconversion of the energy to industrially useful form would lead to further loss of energy. Thus the collection of solar energy on the earth would almost certainly yield at least as much energy, area for area, as collection on the moon, with an incredibly smaller engineering effort.

Well put, Polykarp, but the very point of all this stuff was to make incredibly larger engineering effort. You can imagine him dumbfounded that it took a rumor that the Russians might build a solar plant on the moon to get the committee to consider the sun as a potential energy source. From his terse reply, you get the feeling his sense of technical rationality was offended.

Many fields and scientific endeavors, offered this sort of opening, used the Russians to bring money into their own fields, regardless of their actual applicability to the Cold War. The space budget ended up supporting all kinds of science, not just the sorts that get you off the Earth and to our satellite.

Can you imagine if the space race had gone solar? The amount of resources that could have been put into solar researchers hands might have accelerated the development of the technology. The Russians might have amped up their program. A virtuous spiral might have been created to push the technological learning curve down and to the left. We’d have a different set of technological options now, perhaps.

Kusch, though, didn’t attempt solar part of the grander US-USSR science and technology race. And without that impetus, there was no way that solar energy was going to become part of the discussion. After Kusch’s testimony, the committee’s interest faded. Just the mere mention in some newspaper that the Russians might build a moon base to beam back solar energy to earth was enough to get time in a Congressional hearing. Meanwhile, the actual research going on at the time by guys like Farrington Daniels, George Keck, Maria Telkes, and many others never was taken seriously.

Just making sense is not sufficient to make Congress do something. The lesson is: you’ve got to work within the (possibly idiotic) political framework.

It’s in this context that I read reports on China like the one recently released by The Breakthrough Institute, “Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant.”

“Small, indirect and uncoordinated incentives are not sufficient to outcompete Asia’s clean tech tigers,” the report reads. “To regain economic leadership in the global clean energy industry, U.S. energy policy must include large, direct and coordinated investments in clean technology R&D, manufacturing, deployment, and infrastructure.”

I don’t like using Chinese ascendancy as a solar stick, but it seems to be one of the few things that Congress actually pays attention to. The report was released at an event sponsored by the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee.

Image: LIFE.