Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [44]
With all that stacked against them, the U.S. domestic solar hot water industry slowly withered away. However, other countries picked up where American R&D had left off, notably Levi Yissar’s work on new absorptive coatings in Israel. The Japanese market boomed, as did Turkey’s and much of the European Union. But China became the big market. In 1991 the country had little solar heater manufacturing capacity. By 2005 thirty-five million Chinese families were using solar hot water heaters, with solar commanding a 12 percent market share in the country. In 2007 China had nearly 70 percent of the world’s 2.2 billion square feet of installed collector capacity.27 Chinese solar heater production outpaced Americans’ by 160 times.28
Like so many other renewable energy industries, a field that the United States once dominated has moved on to greener pastures. A technology invented and improved in the United States is a dim memory here and a thriving industry elsewhere.
chapter 12
The Solar Home of the 1950s
WORLD WAR II was a time of deprivation in the United States. Coffee was rationed. Nylon was rationed. Fuel was rationed. The country made do, prodded by advertisements in Life and Time magazines, which promised an even more abundant nation as soon as the war ended. When it did, troops and war laborers began flooding home. For that first couple of years, with the memory of rationing fresh in their minds, a house that didn’t need as much heating oil or gas seemed like a great investment to some Americans. They had seen the world’s fuel supply chains torn apart, severed far more quickly than they had been built. The fragility of the world had been put on display. If the house was a machine for living in which some level of inputs yielded a certain level of service, it made sense to maximize service while minimizing investment. The solar house was like an efficient car.
George Keck built the popular notion of the solar house. The lore goes that Keck discovered the power of the sun while working on his “House of Tomorrow,” which was built almost entirely from glass, for the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1934. Though it was frigid outside and there was no artificial heat in the building, the workers had stripped off their coats and were “complaining of the heat.” From that point forward, Keck spent decades working on harnessing solar energy to reduce heating costs in the buildings of Illinois.1
He was supported by a big business in America, the Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company. In 1935 the company came out with what it called Thermopane windows. They were composed of two sheets of glass with a layer of air sandwiched in between. The air acted as an insulator, keeping heat from escaping from the house while still allowing sunlight in. Although the Thermopane windows were only half as good at holding heat in as modern commercial windows with special glazings, the dual-paned windows were much better at keeping heat inside houses than their single-pane forebears.2
Though the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had been experimenting with more complex solar home designs that incorporated pumps and storage devices, Keck stuck with basic principles. His designs called for big Thermopane windows facing south with overhangs that helped keep out the high summer sun. In the early 1940s the success of his houses in cutting heating bills began to get attention in the Chicago daily newspapers. A local developer, Howard Sloan, who was living in a Keck home, began to promote an entire development in Glenville, Illinois. Sloan himself claimed to have saved 20 percent on his heating bills.3
As rationing ratcheted up American consciousness about energy, the fuel-saving solar homes began to look particularly interesting. Headlines in the major newspapers give a good indication of how optimistic this future looked: In 1944 the Washington Post proclaimed, “Sun May Aid Heating of Postwar Homes