Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [53]
Finally, Rappaport himself was not the right man for the job at that point in his career. Before heading out to SERI, the New York Times interviewed him at his office in Princeton, New Jersey. He seemed to view the job less as the challenge of a lifetime and more as a fun adventure in the wild West. “I think I’ll live longer because of this,” Rappaport said. “I think my blood will flow faster, and I’ll be excited about it.” He joked that the lab, located in the same city as Coors, would have three taps—hot water, cold water, and Coors—and pondered the leisure pursuits the West might offer. “When I get out there, I’m going to learn to ski. I might even take up horseback riding,” he told the Times.13 These were not exactly the words of a man dedicated to driving solar energy into the mainstream. As a result, malaise came over SERI that was noticeable even from the outside. The codirector of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment report on solar power and later SERI employee, Henry Kelly, told Science magazine that the Institute had “enormous potential” under Rappaport, but “never lived up to it.”14
The list of the Institute’s problems grew. Its director of technology development resigned in disgust, telling Physics Today that “I have often found it hard to find a true supporter or dedicated advocate of SERI in the places that count.”15 The august publication Science News called the Institute “riddled by criticism and hobbled by chaos.”16 By the middle of 1979 the need for a change of leadership at SERI had become clear. Shortly after the unveiling of a White House solar hot water heater, Paul Rappaport was rather unceremoniously fired.
His replacement was an altogether different kind of person: a gaunt activist with a deep, abiding passion for solar energy. They chose none other than the thirty-four-year-old Denis Hayes. The same man who, a year earlier, had stood outside the White House gates criticizing Carter and calling for a fundamentally new energy policy was now suddenly standing with the president’s secretary of energy, James Schlesinger, being introduced as the head of the government’s most prominent renewable energy initiative. “To some, it seemed as if the deserving were at least inheriting the Earth,” wrote The New York Times’s Anthony Parisi.17 One of Hayes’s colleagues said to “expect fireworks” once Hayes assumed his role because “you’re not going to see a quiet Denis Hayes.”18
THE LONE ENVIRONMENTALIST
Hayes was a remarkable and incredibly unusual choice. At thirty-five, he was the youngest director of a federal laboratory ever. He did not hold an advanced degree, though he eventually completed a JD at Stanford. More intriguingly, he was an activist, not an engineer, scientist, or bureaucrat. Hayes helped found Earth Day in 1970 and became an influential and committed advocate for solar power, representing a key link between the environmental movement and alternative energy.19
Gus Speth, chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, said he “couldn’t think of a better person.” Henry Kelly of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, called him “an interesting gamble.”20 Although his selection was unusual for solar energy, there was a long line of advocate-managers at the Atomic Energy Commission’s national laboratories as well as in fossil-fuel regulatory bodies.21 Hayes, therefore, gave solar someone who could match the persuasiveness of the leaders of the fossil fuel and nuclear camps. For years solar researchers had languished at tiny outposts on the edge of science. Their programs were barely funded, and their ideas were downplayed or outright mocked. Though some critics have argued