Tinkering With Sunshine: The Prospects for Solar Energy
Oil grows scarcer and more expensive . . . nuclear power becomes increasingly controversial. But consider the sun. The world basks in an inexhaustible source of power, although the technology for using it hardly exists. At the moment solar energy is a field for visionary inventors and entrepreneurs hoping to build the Model T that will give birth to a new industry.
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Duvall Robert Frost: Flic Work of Knowing Peter Davison Tinkering With Sunshine: The Prospects for Solar Energy Oil grows scarcer and more expensive . . . nuclear power becomes increasingly controversial. But consider the sun. The world basks in an inexhaustible source of power, although the technology for using it hardly exists. At the moment solar energy is a field for visionary inventors and entrepreneurs hoping to build the Model T that will give birth to a new industry. By Tracy Kidder October 1977 Issue Share Save In October 1976, on the eve of the natural gas shortages, a twenty-nine-year-old physicist named Amory Lovins published in Foreign Affairs a treatise called “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Since then, the Lovins article has become something of a focal point for the debate over national energy plans. Wc can travel into the future on one of two paths, Lovins writes. The one generally favored by U.S. policy has the nation increasing energy production in all possible ways, but mainly through exploitation of fossil fuels and old-fashioned nuclear fission. Later, in “the era beyond oil and gas,” come large-scale, “arcane” energy systems: breeder reactors, nuclear fusion devices yet to be fully imagined, huge space stations gathering electricity from the sun and beaming the juice to earth in the form of microwaves. Lovins calls this “the hard path.” In Lovins’s view, it is a road with dire social consequences: energy wars, repression at home, environmental degradation, and several kinds of catastrophes associated with uranium. We can follow the other path, “the soft path,” Lovins continues, by engaging in a new and “elegant frugality.” The country maintains its standard of living, but Detroit and Con Edison and the average homeowner learn to conserve truly vast amounts of fossil fuels. In this way, time is bought. We use it to turn, not to new nuclear reactors, but to “benign,” renewable sources of power and heat, and we end up, in about fifty years, living off our “energy income”: chiefly sunshine and solar products like the winds. The technologies employed then arc diverse, easy to understand. safe, relatively clean, and invulnerable to nation-crippling accidents and sabotage because, for the most part, they are deployed at the community level. As a consequence, democracy grows stronger. Our energy suppliers are no longer “alien and remote.” Local autonomy prevails. Nuclear reactors are now antiques and at last there is a chance for peace among nations. Lovins argues that we must choose one path soon, because the country lacks the material and spiritual resources to follow both. Lovins’s scheme for a “soft” energy future rests largely on an optimistic view of solar technologies. It’s a faith that many share. Surely sunshine is the most enticing of energy sources. It can be “mined” in ways that appear to be harmless, and there’s more than enough to go around. Contemplation of the sun’s power leads even respectable scientists to grandiose hypotheses; one physicist has calculated that if we could convert to mechanical power all of the solar radiation that strikes the United States in just a day, we could lift the entire Republic—and the 1000meter-thick crust it sits on—about three and a half feet into the air. For those who feel that mankind must find a way around plutonium, who wince at news of each new oil spill, the sun is today’s messiah. I pick up small-town newspapers and college alumni bulletins and again and again I read of people who have discovered the guiltless joys of using solar energy in the home. It’s the self-reliant way. It’s the way to harmonize with Mother Earth, while keeping the Arabs out of Fort Knox. But how much energy can we get from the “soft” solar technologies, from such things as windmills, solar ponds, solar space and hot-water heating systems, from rooftop arrays of those marvelous photocells that make electricity from sunshine? And how soon can we get it? What is the real market potential of these technologies? The Office of Technology Assessment and the Stanford Research Institute, the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), Mitre Corporation, Westinghouse, GE, Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc. (TRW), and the National Science Foundation are some of the organizations that have looked into the future of solar energy. The House and the Senate have held hearings; the collected volumes of testimony on this subject generated by just one Senate committee have a total weight of about twenty-five pounds. A forty-one-year-old solar architect named Gordon Tully holds that solar technologies will have come of age when the thermal energy produced by all the solar collecting devices in the United States is equivalent to the thermal energy that would be produced by burning all the solar studies. Out of this forest of paper come many conflicting predictions. It isn’t surprising to lind that there is no consensus on what can be done with the sun, because there has been little hard research to go with the studies. In 1952, the Paley Commission prepared a report for President Truman called “Resources for Freedom.” It was a prescient document. It warned of future oil shortages and of a growing dependence on the Middle East, and it recommended “aggressive research” into both the “peaceful atom” and solar technologies. But successive administrations and Congresses took only half that advice. From 1953 to 1973 the U.S. government spent some 5 billion on research and development in nuclear energy, but less than a million on solar technologies. Government spending on solar research did not begin until 1974, after the Arab oil embargo and in the midst of growing protests against nuclear power. Since then, government financing has come on strong, thanks to a generally enthusiastic Congress and, more recently, to the Carter Administration. In fiscal year 1978 the government will spend a record 368 million on solar research, development, and demonstration, and the subsidy will be still larger if, as now seems certain, Congress goes along with the President’s plan to allow tax credits for people investing in solar-heating equipment. Meanwhile, however, about $3 billion will go to R&D in nuclear technologies, and the lion’s share of that will be spent on the breeder reactor and on fusion, which face futures at least as uncertain as those of most solar technologies. The usual explanation for this apparent double standard is that solar technologies simply don’t need as much money as nuclear ones. Energy bureaucrats also say that the infant solar industry isn’t large enough to absorb more money than it’s getting. But many disagree. Henry Kelly, a thirty-two-year-old staffer in Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment, has helped to draw up a study of possible approaches to solar energy. The list is huge. Kelly concludes, “Anybody who says more money can’t be spent on solar technologies is just wrong.” In general, the strongest barriers to larger, useful investments in solar energy appear to lie within the government itself. Soon to be assimilated into the new Department of Energy, ERDA has been a true child of the old Atomic Energy Commission, which it replaced several years ago. The prevalent attitude within ERDA has been that nuclear power is the only possible answer to the country’s future energy needs. Meanwhile, solar technologies have been looked on as small contributors at best, and at worst, as countercultural toys. More than 2000 of ERDA’s employees are involved in nuclear programs, and a mere 100 work in the solar division. ERDA’s hierarchy and the Office of Management and Budget, which control staffing, have kept the solar crew small, and this has made it difficult for the division to spend its money wisely. People in the solar division talk about working twenty-hour days. They admit that they aren’t able to monitor properly even their existing programs. Space and hot-water heating are the most readily practicable of all the solar technologies. Government projects, along with the Arabs and the brutal winter of 1977, have created a boom in the craft. In the early 1970s there were only about 100 solar-heated houses in America. Now there are several thousand and many more on the way, and it is certain that there are even more people working on solar heating than there are solar-heated houses. Professors at more than a dozen universities and something like 550 companies (some large and many small) have entered the competition. It seems the public has been aroused; the governmentsponsored Solar Heating and Cooling Information Center has been receiving about 3000 phone calls a week from interested citizens. About a quarter of all the energy used in America goes to heating buildings. So solar heating could be significant. But how significant? Is Lovins right when he says that this technology is “now available and economical"? With those questions in mind, I went out in the spring and summer of 1977, into a few regions of solar-heating land, to see what part of the future was there. Two views from Olympus An important moment in the history of modern solar-heating technology occurred in 1939, when a team of MIT engineers, led by a young assistant professor named Hoyt Hottel, built a small house outside of Boston and fitted it out with a rooftop “flat-plate” collector. Copper pipes were mounted on a copper surface and the whole thing was covered with three layers of glass. Water was pumped through the pipes on the roof, heated there by the sun, then sent to the basement into a large steel storage tank. The heat was transferred to air and finally circulated through the house by a blower system, as the need arose. This was the prototype for most of the “active” systems on the market and in houses today— systems, that is, in which air or water, moved by mechanical means, carries the heat around. (In a “passive" system, parts of the house itself collect the heat, which is distributed with little or no help from machines.) The first MIT house was nothing more than a laboratory: Hottel used it to establish the basic engineering principles behind solar collector performance and was so meticulous that his calculations served to correct the Weather Bureau. That first house worked; Hottel was able to Use summer sun to heat the building in the winter. But the storage system was huge, “an economic monstrosity,” according to Hottel. So his team built another house, this time using a south-facing wall of water, a more or less passive system. But they weren’t able to insulate the window well enough after dark to keep heat loss at a satisfactory level. So they went back to active systems and built two more houses, and in 1962, after twenty years of experiments, Hottel and his team “shelved" space heating. “We had gotten the data to know it was uneconomical at the time.” It is May 1977, somewhere near the end of the era of cheap oil and gas, and Hoyt Hottel—MIT professor emeritus, seventy-four and white-haired—sits in his office before a large plate-glass window, looking out on a corner of MIT’s labyrinthine campus. He is justifiably proud of his work, but grows dour when he turns to the object of ail those meticulous experiments. He says that over the years he has watched the costs of solar space heating continually hover above the rising costs of conventional heating, and although he allows that the solar approach may now be almost competitive with expensive, inefficient, electrical-resistance heating, he believes it is still much more costly than heating with oil or gas. A consultant from Arthur D. Little would tell me later, “Hottel hasn’t heard of the oil embargo.” A prominent inventor of passive systems would say, “Hottel’s a man who bought a ticket on a horse and threw it away before the race was over. Now he can’t bear to think that his horse might come in.” Hottel, for his part, has said that solar-heating enthusiasts base their case on emotion, not on natural law. He describes their reasoning as follows: “Solar energy has to be a good thing. . . . Out of the window with embarrassing negatives; I’ve made up my mind.” Hottel doesn’t say that solar heating won’t become important sometime in the future, but he says that a future which includes it isn’t one to anticipate with relish. “I think you have to say that when solar energy does become important, that will be a measure of the fact that we are not living as affluently as we do today,” he told me. “Because by present standards, it is by no means the cheapest way to get energy.” Tracy Kidder is a free-lance journalist who often writes about environmental topics. There is no disputing Hottel’s central point. No source of energy, whether it’s solar or nuclear or geothermal, will be as cheap and easy to grasp as the stuff we’ve been using these past 100 years. But it’s because of this fact that solar heating now looks more practical than ever before. To some, in fact, this is the beginning of its exciting, even its romantic, age. On the other side of Cambridge from MIT, near the now-defunct Harvard cyclotron, there is a little office crammed with books and articles on solar heating. In the filing cabinets lie hundreds of letters from well-known and anonymous solar inventors. Everything is in order. The size of the office and the complexity of the subject make order mandatory. William Shurcliff, a sixty-eight-year-old honorary Harvard research fellow, studies other people’s inventions in here. He is the preeminent cataloguer of solar space-heating brainstorms, the author of Solar Heated Homes: A Brief Survey, which he has taken through thirteen editions in the last five and a half years. Shurcliff knows what is out there, if anyone does. Visiting him one day, I remarked that a friend who was building a solar-heated house had hit upon the idea of improving his collector’s performance by dyeing the water inside it black. A novel idea, I had thought. Shurcliff said, “Hmmm. Black water.” From the shelf over his desk he pulled down a thick looseleaf notebook, looked up “Black Water” in the index—“I think books without indexes should be banned, don’t you?”—and proceeded to read off a list of about five companies and “lone wolf" inventors who’d tried it. And then there were several people with hot-air systems who had tried black dust. “So you see there’s been quite a lot on that.” Shurcliff is tall and thin and he speaks in the accent one often hears on the seacoast north of Boston. He describes himself as “a tired old optics man.” “The electromagnetic spectrum is one of the grandest things in the universe,” he told me. “I’ve spent most of my life working in parts of it, so it was very easy for me to get into this field, and I did it eagerly.” For about thirteen years he worked in optics and radiation at Polaroid. Then he came to Harvard and ran radiation security for the atom-smasher, and when his duties ended there some five and a half years ago, he took up solar heating, thinking at first that he would spend his time inventing. He still keeps his hand in, but he found that in general other people’s ideas were more interesting than his own, and so he became a cataloguer, the first and, until recently, the only cataloguer of space-heating ideas. At least once before, Shurcliff has devoted himself to a cause. He is generally credited with a large role in the successful campaign against the SST; mainly, he wrote courtly, threatening letters. These days he could be described as a solar advocate. “This world damn well needs solar heating,” he says. Shurcliff does believe that the solar-heating art can be practical, but he is aware of the problems. “Hurdles,” Shurcliff calls them, disdaining the ordinary word. First among them stand the questions of cost, durability, and performance. In an industry so new, durability is hard to predict, but it is assumed that a good system will last twenty years. To measure the cost and performance of the system, one must weigh the purchase price with interest and the yearly maintenance expense against the savings the system yields in fuel or electric bills. But there are dozens of unknown variables in any costhenefit equation. How much fuel in any given winter would a brand new house use if it weren’t a solar house? What will be the rate of inflation, where will interest rates stand, what will maintenance cost, and, the crucial question, what will be the prices for gas, oil, and electricity? Will there be enough of those commodities to go around, come January 1985? Several studies have attempted to deal with the economic question and several have concluded that solar heating is practical today. But those conclusions are based on a plethora of averages, and there really is no such thing as an average solar-heating system, an average house, or, in many places, an average winter. Shurcliff seems more reliable. He has studied particular systems. He thinks that at least 80, and maybe 97 percent of them aren’t a bargain, not as they are measured beside today’s gas and oil prices. Hard enough, then, to make a solar-heating system pay when it’s installed on a new house designed with the sun in mind. “How much more difficult it is,” exclaims Shurcliff, “to ‘retrofit’ solar heating to an existing, badly insulated, imperfectly oriented house in a region crowded with tall trees or tall neighboring buildings!” Perhaps householders will be persuaded to undertake retrofits as home improvements or as security against some dark, cold, fuel-less winter. Maybe, as Shurcliff suggests, some will decide that it’s fun, “like owning a yacht.” But economics will weigh heavy, and retrofit will always be an expensive proposition, like any remodeling job. Although sunshine is free, the nation would have to pay a price for widespread solar heating. Putting the systems in place would require large amounts of labor and natural resources such as copper. A great deal ol energy would be expended; it takes about five years for a well-designed system to gather as much useful energy as it took to build it. A host of small problems must be dealt with, too. For example, experts agree that the most economical systems provide only part— somewhere between 30 and 60 percent—of the heating needs for an average house. So a back-up system is required, and an electrical one is usually the cheapest to install. But thousands of solar houses in a given area, using electricity only on cold, cloudy days, would force the local utility to invest in equipment that would be used just a few times a year. The result would be special high electric rates for solar-heated homes. A possible solution, now being investigated, is to have solar-home owners turn on the power only during the utility’s off-peak hours, and use this electricity to heat up their storage systems. Shurcliff seems a careful man. He approaches the future cautiously, by asking questions. But five and a half years of studying the designs that