Princeton’s archive of the Office for Technology Asessment

Many articles have come out recently looking back at the Carter administration — the best is Joshua Green’s in The Atlantic — to deduce the similarities between our current energy problems and those the world faced in the 70s. Green did a great job of telling the story as its remembered in Silicon Valley and among the current generation of greentech VC.

But what if they don’t actually remember it well. What if their evaluations of what happened back then are wrong? It would actually be pretty tough to tell because very few of the people, projects, and publications that spun out of the Carter administration’s renewable energy efforts remain. In 1977, the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) came into existence. For the next five years, its people looked into all kinds of ideas for generating energy from non-fossil sources. It was the only truly concerted Federal effort to rethink the energy system from a non-fossil perspective we’ve ever engaged in.

Then, in 1981, Reagan’s new DOE head, James B. Edwards, a dentist by training, pushed out the director of SERI, Denis Hayes, a solar energy advocate to the core. The dentist declared that “a vote for President Reagan was a vote for nuclear future.” Edwards rejected solar demonstration and commercialization projects as market distortions but supported nuclear and oil shale demonstration projects that cost far more. A major report, which later surfaced thanks to the efforts of Richard Ottinger, a congressman from New York, detailing immediately implementable energy efficiency ideas was suppressed.

Basically, Reagan gutted SERI. The new head, Hub Hubbard, seems like a good man, but a company man. He kept the scientists at the institute from even thinking about getting things into the marketplace and focused them exclusively on long-range projects that, Reagan all but hoped publicly, would never work.

The radical history of SERI, which became the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 1990, was slowly elided. Almost none of the publications from that era are available on the Internet. Many of the lab’s analysts and researchers moved on and don’t often revisit the old days. The only place you can find out what happened is in the library at NREL. It looks like this:

There are fake plants and flourescent lighting. The elevators smelled like stale smoke.

Point being: people don’t visit the National Renewable Energy Laboratory library very often. Few of the documents that I saw had ever been formally checked out of the library.

Now, though, you don’t have to brave NREL’s leased office park  to get a hold of (some) SERI documents. I photographed 90 documents ranging from short papers to massive several hundred page tomes. Then, I uploaded them to Scribd. It’s not an elegant solution: I haven’t run OCR on them and you can actually see my hands holding the pages flat in some pictures. These documents are now available, though, and that struck me as a lot more important than looking for the perfect way to do it. The best looking documents in the bunch — marked with a T at the end of the year in the title — were scanned for me by Tami Sandberg, one of the excellent NREL librarians.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be typing up abstracts and adding annotations to the papers, highlighting important works, etc. I sure could use some help, though, so if you feel like looking over some documents, let me know. I’d appreciate it mightily.

For the full list of SERI docs, head here. Here’s a rotating favorite, embedded:

Chronology of Major Energy Dates – 1978