Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [43]
Miami was booming, nearly tripling its population from 1920 to 1925. H. M. “Bud” Carruthers showed up in the hot town with the Florida rights to Bailey’s patent and a dream of building a solar hot water empire. With the California experience in hand, he set about creating the most successful solar industry of the first half of the twentieth century. “More than half the Miami population used solar heated water by 1941, and 80 percent of the new homes built in Miami between 1937 and 1941 were solar-equipped,” wrote Butti and Perlin. 20
By the late 1930s ten companies were competing for the solar hot water market. They would install perhaps as many as 100,000 units in Florida between 1936 and 1941. Furthermore, the newly created Federal Housing Authority financed the purchase of some solar units under a home improvement loan program.21 This first federal solar incentive let Floridians buy a solar heater for installment payments of six bucks a month. It was no surprise that people bought units left and right.
Later solar hot water studies found that the technology remained cost competitive with fossil fuels into the 1970s and probably remains so today, but, nonetheless, the industry slowly died out after the war. 22 It’s a perfect example of how costs alone don’t always determine people’s choices in technologies.
As people looked to purchase new water heaters in the early 1950s, they tended to see old solar heaters that had been installed during the 1930s. Many of these had problems with corrosion in the water tanks. It was an easily avoidable problem in retrospect, but the solar installers didn’t know that. A few burst tanks “badly tarnished solar energy’s reputation of being a trouble-free way to heat water.”23 As solar’s reputation was taking a hit, Florida Power and Light, like many utility companies, “mounted a major publicity drive for electrification.” The grow-and-build plan for big power companies dominated their thinking throughout the middle of the century, leading them to push consumers to consume larger and larger amounts of energy.
This strategy often worked to push down the cost of a kilowatt-hour of electricity, as it did in Florida. By the early 1950s the price of that much energy was only four cents, down three cents from the previous couple of decades. With this tough new competitor, solar would have had to cut its costs to keep its price advantage. However, the use of copper, a major solar hot water material, was skyrocketing for other applications like electronics and infrastructure. Between 1930 and 1960 the use of copper in America nearly doubled.24 Between 1938 and 1948 alone, its price actually did double, making the solar collectors more expensive at the moment when they needed to be cheaper. 25
The costs associated with putting the installations on roofs were also annoyingly immune to cost reductions. Solar installers had the air of mom-and-pop builders. Each home was a specific job that had to be expertly evaluated and then worked on. Meanwhile, the electric water heater companies were building a box that did not need any special local knowledge. Add it all up and electric water heaters had largely closed the price advantage that solar water heaters had once enjoyed.
To make matters worse for the solar industry, “a new force, the large-scale builder-developer,” showed up in Florida. These companies had a perverse set of incentives because they built homes before they sold them. Their only concern was driving down the up-front cost of construction. Electric water heaters fit their needs perfectly because they seemed cheaper, even if their cost over the life of the house could have been higher. “Developers almost always included electric hot