Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [56]
In just the four years between 1975 and 1979, the cost of photovoltaic modules had dropped by a factor of three as money poured into the field and production increased.36 The government guaranteed that they would purchase photovoltaic modules, which provided an indirect incentive for private companies to scale up and drive down the unit cost of PV.37 Like so many technologies before them, photovoltaics appeared poised to ride a learning curve to mass adoption. “I was really convinced that we could do this thing. That we would drive these things down learning curves and get efficiencies of scale,” Hayes said. “We were really going to foment something.”38
They had another ambitious plan in the works, too. Congressman Richard Ottinger, who might be the most stalwart champion of green tech ever to pass through the legislative branch, asked the Deputy Secretary of Energy, John Sawhill, to create an “in-depth solar/conservation study.” Drawing on the work of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Art Rosenfeld, Princeton’s Robert Williams, the University of Michigan’s Marc Ross, and SERI’s Henry Kelly, the report sketched out an alternative vision for the American energy system that its authors felt would be cheaper and less environmentally destructive.
In fact, the takeaway message for utilities from the report was, in Rosenfeld’s estimation, “Be wary before you invest prematurely in 50 GW of new plants (at $1–$2 billion each), the need for which is many years off.”39 The report was a direct challenge to the future that the energy industry said was inevitably on its way. The report said America could substantially cut its fuel usage while still maintaining economic growth by increasing energy efficiency and the use of solar energy.40
THE REAGANITES ARE COMING!
Politics, however, would intervene before Hayes’s team had a chance to test their optimism. Jimmy Carter was crushed in the November election by former General Electric spokesman, Ronald Reagan.
Before the election, Hayes had been buoyed by a series of radio addresses that Reagan gave in which he promoted decentralized energy sources. It made sense to Hayes, too. Going off the grid is a radically conservative position in some ways, smelling as it does of self-reliance and Jeffersonian republicanism. But Hayes and SERI were in for a nasty reality check. As it turned out, the speeches had been written by a farright Libertarian, John McClaughry, who envisioned a small-scale, rural democracy growing up in New England. He echoed many of those thoughts in the 1990 libertarian tract he coauthored, The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale. The Los Angeles Times called the book “The Small is Beautiful of politics.”41 McClaughry wrote, “We do not feel Vermont will be able to work toward the strong network of small-scale local energy sources it needs until the political control over energy is decentralized.”42
Reagan’s politics were not McClaughry’s, however. His transition team not only immediately went after SERI, but they also suggested closing the entire Department of Energy while maintaining nuclear research support structures in its place.43 When that plan floundered under Congressional attacks, Reagan appointed former dentist and unabashed nuclear proponent, Allan Edwards, to head the Department of Energy. Edwards made it clear that “a vote for President Reagan was a vote for a nuclear future.” He quickly proposed halving the SERI budget and cutting overall solar spending by 60 percent. In particular, those technologies closest to commercialization were the ones that would receive the least support.44
Programs that had just begun, like durability testing for solar