Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [100]
The Meinels took their show on the road, putting the full weight of their scientific credibility behind the project. Aden Meinel was the head of the Optical Sciences Center at the University of Arizona and Marjorie had a master’s in astronomy and had edited scientific journals at Cal-Tech.12 The prominence of their affiliations meant that they got audiences you might not expect, like some important officials of energy-and sun-rich regions like Saudi Arabia.
Furthermore, the Meinels didn’t look down on small-scale solar. In fact, it had inspired them at the Applied Solar Energy Society conference in 1956. At that event, the giants of mid-century solar research all turned out. The University of Wisconsin’s Farrington Daniels, a former nuclear scientist who had been a member of the Manhattan Project, showed off his solar cooker. The University of Colorado’s George Lof promoted his ideas for solar housing. Dozens of other researchers and groups came together under the hot Phoenix sun as the Meinels wandered the exhibits.
However, one thing stuck with them about the approach of the Applied Solar Energy Society, interesting as they found their colleagues’ work. “All of the solar was for individuals. You could have it for your house. You could have a solar cooker,” Aden Meinel said. “We thought that solar should be large-scale instead if it was going to have any national impact.”13
But large-scale solar advocates came under heavy attack. An article in Science noted that federal solar research had supported “large central stations to produce solar electricity in some distant future” while largely ignoring smaller technologies. “The massive engineering projects designed by aerospace companies which dominate much of the program seem to have in mind the existing utility industry—rather than individuals or communities—as the ultimate consumer of solar energy equipment,” the authors wrote.14 They suggested that the government’s program was struggling with the nature of solar energy, which was different. “Solar energy is democratic. It falls on everyone and can be put to use by individuals and small groups of people.”15
Although solar energy does fall everywhere, it doesn’t fall equally everywhere. Nor are the dynamics of the energy industry erased by its availability: The utility business was and is a major consumer of solar energy equipment. The criticisms also assumed that large-scale deployments of solar collectors and other energy sources would be occurring quickly, disregarding any criticism of solar’s technological readiness as bias or pessimism. The experience of green technologists over the past thirty years suggests that distributed solar and wind power were not ready for industrial-scale production during the mid 1970s. More and better research might have changed that, but without massive technological progress, they would not have made meaningful contributions to the nation’s electricity system.
Even simple things like passive solar housing design needed technical and analytical infrastructure as provided by Art Rosenfeld and the physicists (see chapter 17). Large-scale solar farms are on the verge of a massive commercialization all over the world, primarily with expertise gained at the Luz plants (see chapter 14), which themselves drew on federal R&D into solar thermal technologies (see chapter 13). The Meinels themselves could not secure research funds to extend their work beyond the laboratory scale, and eventually they gave up on solar energy, but not before laying out the gameplan for later solar farms.
The innovation ecosystem of the 1970s wasn’t perfect. The idea of funding small, high-tech companies instead of either large, high-tech companies or low-tech solar hopefuls did not take hold. What is unquestionable, though, is that technological progress during the 1970s set