In a controversial piece on nuclear power a few months ago, I pointed out that people’s views about nuclear power are embedded in their broader attitudes about science and equity and the trustworthiness of experts.

Turns out, much the same is true of climate science. How people feel about the trustworthiness of a technical analysis is only kind of linked with the quality of the work. Today’s Green, Inc., links to Harvard professor Sheila Jasanoff’s essay on the “trust deficit” climatologists face. Here’s the New York Times summary:

Sheila Jasanoff, professor of science and public policy at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, says that climate scientists face two significant challenges: to produce and communicate the best information about climatic changes, and to build public trust. The trust part, she says, does not necessarily flow from the quality of the science, as many scientists hope or believe.

The entire modern scientific enterprise, she argues, requires the lay public to place faith in strangers, to have confidence in the experts who understand specialized knowledge that untrained citizens do not share. The public must also believe that those experts — the scientific priesthood — are not conspiring to dupe them.

“It’s not just a function of information, but an ongoing relationship with the public, a willingness to show why you should be believed,” Professor Jasanoff said.

“A willingness to show why you should be believed” is something that has always proven difficult for technical folks involved up-and-down the energy industry. They tend to have the attitude: “Why believe me? Because your frigging lights are on, that’s why!” And they aren’t totally wrong. Keeping the system running is an accomplishment that should be respected, even by those who want to change it.

But for energy folks trying to get people to understand where they are coming from, “because I said so” is just about the least effective rhetorical strategy.

Front page image from: Your Friend the Atom, a Walt Disney film.

In just the past week, the Department of Energy has handed out $10 billion in conditional loan guarantees for two nuclear and three solar plants, I report over at Wired Science.

My full piece has the nuts-and-bolts (e.g. $8.3 for nuclear, $1.4 for solar) but I wanted to entertain a couple of interesting notions about energy politics here.

First, the solar funding announcement seemed to come as a bit of a surprise for BrightSource. Their executives weren’t waiting by the phone, available for comment, as would normally be the case with something like this. The DOE appears to have made the announcement without much notice, even though the company’s application was first made in 2006. Could it be that Chu and the rest of the DOE were feeling a little blowback from the nuclear loan guarantee announcement last week and needed to get a solar one out there quick? It’s just speculation, but it’s not crazy.

Two, ever since I started reporting on climate and energy, it’s been pretty clear that the coal-heavy southeast was going to be a major problem in trying to get any carbon legislation passed. They have a lot to lose and don’t have anything close to the wind or solar resources of the midwest and west, respectively. Add in that the region is generally pretty conservative and you’ve got trouble.

The question has always been, “What’s the political compromise going to be?” I’d always thought that it would end up being major carbon capture projects, but maybe nuclear power will be the centerpiece of the energy southern strategy.

Something Jim Rogers, the ubiquitous head of Duke Energy, once told me has always stuck. He said that perhaps looking after and containing the waste from a nuclear plant will turn out to be logistically easier than the same operation with CO2. Whether or not it’s true (or remains necessary with improvements in other energy technologies), he was clearly hinting that he preferred nukes to coal plants with CCS in the future carbon-constrained world.

Image: Tier3 solar prospecting tools.

The Cold War was a political magnet that clearly distorted U.S. energy policy…

And that’s as good an excuse as any to post this incredible card of a very angry Santa Father Frost (see comments) unleashing a bag full of Soviet whoop-ass on some enemies.

Unfortunately, there’s no context for the post card.

Via @Colin_Peters

One of them was so good that I wanted to highlight it here (with a couple of links added for non-wonks).

woolie provides a very smart summation of how nuclear power could work for lefties. There is good historical precedent for a Democratic government to push something like this. The whole Bureau of Reclamation, for example.

As a nuclear fan, of course I’m going to point to EDF/Areva as the model. I certainly think there should be a very high level of state involvement in nuclear power; as bedrock functions go, I think electricity is a natural place for a government monopoly, as with other critical infrastructure, where reliability and safety should be the primary concern more than profits. Additionally state financing for these large scale projects works out better, also for indemnity (simpler than something like Price-Anderson), high-level long-term planning, etc. etc. Everything works out better. (In practice, though, you get corporate welfare policies because only republicans are pushing the idea, and privatizing profit/socializing risk is their favorite thing in the whole world.)

Now, even the most ardent of small-d democratic activist must recognize that there will always be some level of local opposition for any public project. You can’t even manage to get wind turbines built in many technically excellent locations because of NIMBY opposition. Not to mention something like Yucca Mtn (which was always a bad idea — glad Obama killed it.) But that’s why we have state and federal elections. Sometimes you can’t let a very small (if well funded and motivated) minority oppose necessary projects based on reasons that are deeply ideological and not open to reconsideration. There are many examples of groups stalling large projects on spurious legal grounds that the investors cut their losses and walk. (Another good reason for loan guarantees and combined construction/operating licenses, etc.)

Look at the health care debate. Republicans are united in ideological opposition for political reasons — they cannot praise any pending reform legislation in any way because it would weaken their position — first, they would have to propose an idea of their own, and second it would chill the rhetoric they use. It’d make it a policy debate instead of an identity politics debate, which (coming from the left myself) I recognize as fruitless and intractable. I think much of the anti-nuclear opposition is in the same vein. Certain subsets of environmental activists have fought hard for their power and influence for years. Nothing wrong with that, I certainly agree with most of their platform. But abandoning one of their core tenets (which was adopted many years ago, before AGW, before modern designs, before hundreds of years of operating experience, convoluted with nuclear weapons, etc.etc.etc) — or even moderating it — would undermine their efforts. Look at the infighting that is currently going on in that community as some people do moderate/change their position on nuclear. So as a nuclear activist, you often come up against an ideological wall that categorically rejects all evidence contrary to an entrenched position.

One thing to note is that many renewable proponents don’t necessarily dislike nuclear power plants. They just don’t see them as the cheapest route to clean electricity over the medium term. There’s a ton of uncertainty of over expensive and how long a new nuclear plant would take to build. Berkeley’s Dan Kammen, a nuclear engineering professor,said that a single new nuclear plant could take 100 months and $10 billion to build at the Google event I attended Monday. MIT’s Ernie Moniz strenuously disagreed, particularly on the timeline. In the long, long term it probably doesn’t matter, but over the next few years — a timespan considered key among climate change scientists — it certainly does.

Monday night, in Google’ swanky San Francisco office, the company hosted an event on energy innovation with a slate of heavy hitters including Lynn Orr, head of Stanford’s Precourt Energy Institute, Berkeley’s Dan Kammen, MIT’s Ernie Moniz, and Google’s Dan Reicher. Venture capitalist Tim Woodward of Nth Power ably moderated.

Few groups have more or broader experience with energy innovation issues than these guys and they were all in agreement on the R&D funding increase and even the $15 billion annual number. A couple interesting funding mechanisms for clean energy R&D were discussed, too, including a very small “line charge” on electricity sold, which would send money into a pool for R&D. Apparently, a similar system worked for natural gas. (Random historical footnote: the money was managed through a non-profit called the Gas Research Institute, which apparently was wildly successful. It’s now called the Gas Technology Institute.)

I also loved this quote from Kammen because it’s true: “The markets for energy need to reflect the values we want, not the ones we inherited.” It’s hard to find a better summary of the problems of technological momentum. The way we make, sell, and buy power were all passed down to us and it takes a lot of work to think of new ways of doing things.

A few other bits from my notes.

• There was one noticeable flashpoint. While all voiced half-hearted to full-throated support for nuclear power, in the press briefing preceding the event, Dan Kammen said that he’d heard that the cost and timeline of a new nuclear plant is running $10 billion and 100 months. Moniz cut in, saying, “I’m going to have to disagree with that.” And they had a brief jab contest on how long actual plants might take to build before returning to their corners.
• Kammen is heading a group within the IPCC that will release a report on renewable energy that, as he emphasized over and over, will contain the first “zero carbon scenarios for 2030 and 2040.”
• Moniz — and others — warned that most of the new energy funding came from the stimulus package, and that after the next year and a half, there was a danger of energy R&D falling off a cliff. This happened, of course, in the 1980s and was very destructive.
• Google’s Reicher was the most specific. The Googlers have coined a new phrase to describe their approach: Lightbulb to Lightbulb. That is, government needs to help from the new idea to the actual product. He pushed enhanced geothermal, solar thermal, and off-shore wind for the East Coast of the U.S. He pushed for a Federal renewable portfolio standard and — intriguingly — repeatedly voiced support for the Clean Energy Deployment Administration. In fact, he noted that deployment should be one of the government’s key roles. Keep in mind, this is a major reversal from Reagan’s renewables policy.
• All of the panelists said they spent a lot of time in China and were heartened by recent climate negotiations between Beijing and Washington. Kammen called them “increasingly intertwined and nuanced.” Moniz predicted that what we’d see out of Copenhagen was an agreement between developed and developing countries on technological cooperation
• I asked Moniz about what kind of nuclear reactors he expected to see in the future, if any. He said, “If nuclear is going to expand, it’s going to be light water reactors.” He said it’d be decades before we saw new nuclear plant designs (like the Internet-favorite, liquid flouride thorium reactor).
• Kammen called Art Rosenfeld, “the father of energy efficiency.” Which is nice. He was the progenitor of California’s landmark energy efficiency regulations, which have kept the state’s energy needs far below what was once projected.
• Undersecretary of Energy Kristina Johnson’s presentation was a bit underwhelming. They beamed her in from Washington, D.C., and I think the technology setup was bad. Still, she could have delivered a slightly less safe and bureaucratic talk.

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.

The top graph shows constant change in the energy supply over the last one hundred years. The bottom graph shows no change in energy supply over the next 20+ years.

“While the Nation’s energy history is one of large-scale change as new forms of energy were developed,” the DOE writes, “the outlook for the next couple of decades (assuming current laws, regulations, and policies) is for continued reliance on fossil fuels (with coal growing faster than liquid fuels and natural gas), modest growth in hydroelectric power and nuclear electric power; and a doubling of non-hydroelectric renewable energy by 2030.”

Let’s paraphrase: even though the history of the nation’s energy usage shows constant change, we’re predicting no further change. I guess when you’ve been burned by past forecasts, you get a little gunshy. Still, is it really the most credible scenario that almost nothing would change in our nation’s energy mix?

In the late 70s, Denis Hayes, then director of the Solar Energy Research Institute, was pushing hard to market solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources. Under his direction, SERI produced all kinds of people-friendly outreach documents as well as some films. I haven’t been able to track down many of them, but this one happened to get uploaded to YouTube. It’s probably from late 1979 or 1980.

In the interest of pulling its content into my SERI “archive,” I transcribed it for your inspection. Of particular interest are the brief interviews with Marcellus Jacobs and Ted Finch, both serious wind pioneers. The story of Jacobs is told very well by historian Robert Wrighter in his mid-90s book, Wind Energy in America. Finch was a major force in getting net metering legally established.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

The sun converts five million tons of matter into energy every second. This energy from nuclear reactions within the sun is sent out into the solar system as light and heat. The Earth receives only a small part of this energy, which we see and feel in different ways.

As the sun warms the Earth, the air is also warmed. The warm air rises and cool air rushes in below causing the conversion of sunlight into another form of solar energy: wind.

Today, this turbine harnesses wind to provide some of the energy for running an amusement park near Allentown, Pennsylvania. Another example of wind used today is this turbine which helps light Clayton, New Mexico.

Use of wind energy will increase in the future and help the UnitedSTaets to become more energy independent. But wind energy is nothing new in America. The idea of windmills was brought here by early European settlers and used in many ways: to power grinding mills and later to pump water for the steam locomotives that connected New York and San Francisco and to supply water for farming.

These early windmills were mechanical, often using a series of gears to harness energy. This energy could be stored by using the wind to pump water into an elevated storage tank. Gravity delivered the water whether the wind was blowing or not. This system was used for irrigation and household water supplies.

With the coming of electric lights and appliances, wind systems were designed to generate electricity. A series of batteries was used to store this energy. Wind Energy reached its peak in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s when 2 million windmills were in operation, providing an important source of energy for rural America. Many households had their own windmill and generator. Most of those generators produced 1 or 2 kilowatts of electricity. A kilowatt is 1000 watts and can light 10 100-watt light bulbs.

During the 1940s, large wind generators, which could provide power to many users, were introduced. This power was distributed through a utility grid, a network of transmission liens which sent electricity from a central source to individual users. Towering above Grandpa’s Knob near Rutland, Vermont, the Smith Putnam Turbine fed electricity to a Vermont utility company. This system was designed to produce up to 1.25 megawatts of electricity. One megawatt is 1 million watts or enough electricity to light 10,000 100-watt light bulbs.

But a cheaper, more convenient source of energy was sweeping the country. One that didn’t require batteries, water storage tanks, or maintenance. Electric power liens from centralized coal and gas fired power plants brought cheaper electricity to outlying areas and wind energy was neglected.

Today, increasing cost and other problems associated with conventional fuel make wind again a promising part of America’s energy resources

In theory, it is possible to harness about 60% of the energy in the winds. This potentially usable power the wind blowing across he United States in one year is more than the country’s total power needs for that same period.

Meet Marcellus Jacobs whose work with wind spans the period from the peak of wind energy use in the 30s and 40s to the present revival of interest.

MARCELLUS JACOBS: We just started off on our wind plan on the ranch there in Montana, 40 miles from town. We had no electricity and there was no hope of high line for a good many years. So we started to deice a machine to make electricity from the wind, of which there was plenty.

And, uh, we built several test plants using Ford Motel T [unintelligible] we built about a dozen and put them on ranches for about 50 miles around there. After 3 or 4 years they proved so successful we decided to make a business of it.

Our past experience in developing and building wind energy systems proved that with the increase in energy costs, a new and improved type of wind energy systems would be very practical and competitive with the energy cost of fossil fuel systems now being used.

There are problems with wind energy. It doesn’t always blow when and where you want it. And quality machines are expensive.

But solutions are being sought. The Department of Energy is testing small systems for individual use and large machines for centralized utility needs.

The number of commercially available wind turbine models has grown from fewer than 20 in 1976 to 72 in 1979.

Several of today’s small wind machines are undergoing tests at the Department of Energy’s rocky flats facility in Colorado.

These tests are meant to provide valuable information to consumers wind turbine manufacturers, and organizations affecting the use of wind machines such as banks, zoning commissions, and insurance companies.

There’s also a Rocky Flats program to develop new, advanced designs that increase the lifespan and reliability of wind machines and lower their manufacturing costs. The Department tof Energy is working with NASA to develop large-scale wind machines.

Four large-scale turbines are generating power for electric utility companies. They are operating in New Mexico, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, and North Carolina.

Another department of energy/NASA project is this giant machine. Because it will produce 2.5 megawatts of power, even in areas having more moderate winds, it will be more widely usable than previous experimental models.

Private industry is also designing and building large-scale machines. On Cutty Hunk Island in Massachusetts, the municipal utility has lowered its fossil fuel use by replacing some diesel-generated electricity with wind power. This 200 kW machine was developed entirely with private funds.

Public utilities too are interested in wind. This turbine served as a prototype for development of a megawatt-scale machine, part of SCE’s $2 million wind energy development program.

Much is being done to develop cost effective reliable equipment, but what about the need for storing excess power for low wind periods. Batteries work in some cases, but today another option exists.

Martin Greenwald of Thomas Ridge New York gets some of his electricity form a 2 kW windmill on his farm. The Greenwalds use what energy they need and any excess generated by the windmill is fed into the utility grid building up a credit on their account.

A similar situation exists in another part of New York, New York City. While the urban environment is generally not conducive to wind machines because of high and unpredictable turbulence caused by tall buildings, it was here that the legal precedent was established to tie in small systems with the utility grid.

Ted Finch, wind energy engineer, explains the importance of this action.

TED FINCH: We established the right for people to produce power from decentralized wind systems and interconnect that wind energy conversion system with the utility company. It’s much more expensive with small wind energy conversion systems to ave battery storage. So especially with small installations, it’s important ot interconnect with the utility company to serve as the backup when the winds are low and also where they buy back your surplus wind-derived electricity. This will enhance the economics of wind machines and it’s an important wind energy policy area to pursue.

The problems are being examined and solved. And wind is being used today. This rubine in Texas heats water. These ridge top turbines light this cross above Denver, Colorado. And this eggbeater turbine, a joint Department of Energy and United States Department of Agriculture research project supplies energy for irrigation near Garden City, Kansas. And this one provides energy to refrigerate milk on a dairy farm near Fort Collins, Colorado.

These three turbines convert sea breeze into power for a newspaper in St. Petersburg, Florida. Wind has great potential as an energy source in America. A potential that is in the process of being realized.
As manufacturing costs decrease with mass production, as new technology and stronger and lighter materials are developed and as the cost of conventional energy continues to rise, wind energy will find an even more important place under the sun.

Inventing Green Thoughts: There are two key things to note here. First, the SERI scientists were trying to push solar cell costs down to between 14 and 40 cents a watt (!), based on 1980 dollars. Second, they thought they could get there by the year 2000.

“Several significant advances in solar cell R&D have occurred over the past few years,” Kazmerski writes. “Those solar cell technologies that are expected to meet the long-term national goals (i.e., $0.14-0.40/peak-watt, based upon 1980 dollars, in the 1990-2000 time-frame) have demonstrated progress both in interediate efficiency (>10%) thin-film device, and the very-high efficiency (aimed at greater than 30%) concentrator areas.”

Turns out, they were just a bit off. The Solarbuzz retail price per peak watt survey has found prices varying between $4.56 and $4.88 over the last few years. Sure, some companies can make modules for less, but they are merely aiming for a buck or two a watt, not 14 cents!

It goes to show how little scientists really knew about the photovoltaic materials that they were working with.

Kazmerski cites a paper by Larry Magid on the U.S. National Photovoltaic Program in which Magid asserts that photovoltaics would become cost effective in the southwest by 1986.

“A key element in this program is the expectation that photovoltaic residences will begin to be cost effective within the Southwestern United States when modules are priced at 70 cents/peak watt and the total installed system costs from $1.6 to $2.20 per peak watt (in 1980 dollars),” Magid writes. “The program anticipates this occurring in 1986.”

SERI engineers were overly optimistic about photovoltaics’ potential to be cost competitive in the near term. Even if the Reagan administration had kept up or even increased R&D spend, it seems impossible in retrospect that prices could have dropped as much as they anticipated by 1986 or 1990 or 2000.

One key impact from this excessive optimism is that they could have privileged exotic technologies over plain old silicon hoping to get a big cost breakthrough. Silicon-advocate and long-time solar researcher, Georgia Tech’s (and Suniva’s) Ajeet Rohatgi put it best here on Inventing Green.

This is very interesting. This is good or bad for silicon. The good part is that we know silicon material very well. We know all the properties of silicon. But this sometimes ends up being a disadvantage for silicon because we know too much about it. We are not willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. If you look at where a lot of the investment is going, people will talk about 2% organic cells and say some day they will be 10-15%. Because people don’t know about those materials they are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

We see evidence of the home run mindset in the paper. Kazmerski doesn’t even mention the use of monocrystalline silicon, which is what Rohatgi’s company uses.

Ignoring the technologies that are actually closest to commercialization could end up being a general problem for those advocating that true breakthroughs are needed to push solar into a major component of the power mix. Instead of focusing on simple incremental technical advances and capturing scaling efficiencies for established technologies, they might direct funds to higher risk enterprises.

It’s possible that SERI’s approach makes sense, but only if it’s pared with realistic goals and outcomes.

Oh, and Larry Mazerski is still a leader in PV research. He stayed at SERI through the bad years and through the 90s after it became NREL. In fact, he now heads up the National Center for Photovoltaics. I’ll be trying to get a hold of him soon to talk about those early years.

Advances in Photovoltaics R&D – An Overview – 1981

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