Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [52]
The rain did fall on Sun Day at SERI, and it was not an auspicious sign.6
Even in the best of times, SERI was not much to look at. The researchers operated out of rented space in an office park just off I-70, the highway that runs from Denver to the mountains and the great western desert beyond. Stubby office buildings clustered around small concrete ponds. Inside, the light was perfect fluorescent yellow. SERI looked more like a place where people made telemarketing calls or provided inside sales for a trucking company than the leading edge of a revolutionary solar movement. Although they had been promised a big, new campus with better research facilities, the designs were firmly stuck on the drawing board with no funds appropriated to build it. Unlike the big DOE labs, the Institute did not have a storied history, or Defense Department money.
SERI struggled to fulfill its promise as the largest group of researchers ever assembled to study renewable energy, and this occurred for four main reasons. First, the Institute was not given quite the level of support that it needed to pursue its wide-ranging vision. Its fiscal year 1979 budget was just $25 million, about half of what a National Academy of Sciences report sketching out the tasks for a prospective institute had recommended.7
The researchers had an enormous amount of ground to make up in comparison to other energy sources, as very little R&D had gone into making solar technologies feasible. In the fiscal year 1973 the lead solar agency in the land, the National Science Foundation, received less than $4 million for all of its research on solar technology.8 From then on, although solar research budgets did grow, they never matched the big budget fossil fuel and nuclear technology R&D coffers. In 1979, however, the federal solar R&D budget had grown to $484 million, a 12,100 percent increase in just six years. That year, all types of renewable energy received total government funding and incentives of $1.36 billion.9
But that was still a miniscule amount in comparison to the federal budget as a whole, which broke half a trillion dollars for the first time that year. Even compared with other energy R&D projects, solar energy funding wasn’t generous. The Synfuels program, which aimed to demonstrate the conversion of coal to liquid fuels, pulled in $4 billion from 1970 to 1984. Breeder nuclear reactors, zero of which operate in the United States, picked up an estimated $16 billion between 1968 and 1985.10 What’s more, the fossil fuels industries have received tremendous tax subsidies through the decades. The oil industry alone received $300 billion in tax incentives from 1953 to 2003.11
Second, SERI’s research power was further diluted by the establishment of four Regional Solar Energy Centers, which came into being as a political compromise between the Carter Administration and Congress. Landing SERI was considered quite a pork-barrel prize for the delegation that could deliver its jobs, popularity, and prestige to its state. Nineteen states vied for the new lab, but when Golden, Colorado, was selected as the future home of the Institute, other states’ representatives started lobbying for a more regional research approach. They got their wish with the Regional Solar Energy Centers. The final arrangement, however, was far from perfect. The Centers did not have a clear and defined purpose but instead siphoned off funds and focus from SERI’s work. A close observer called the “birth pains” of SERI “a classical example of what happens when political expediency overtakes a basically sound idea.”12
Third, the list of technologies SERI was supposed to tackle was long: solar heating and cooling of buildings, agricultural and industrial process heat applications, solar thermal electric generation, photovoltaic technology, wind energy conversion, bioconversion,