Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [57]
Unlike nuclear power, which had survived several administrations with much of its funding largely intact, solar energy was not able to withstand the political change that blew in with Reagan. His administration began a large-scale rollback of Carter’s solar initiatives, choosing to starve them of funds even if they didn’t outright reject them. The Solar Energy Research Institute lost half its cash. Equally important, it was clear that solar energy was no longer what economic historian Steve Cohn calls an “official technology” anointed by government as worth pursuing. Investors and entrepreneurs realized that it might be time to get out of the solar game.
SERI researchers were devastated. In the early months of 1981, shortly after Reagan took office, Hayes arrived early at DOE headquarters for a meeting with the acting assistant secretary for conservation and renewable energy, Frank DeGeorge. As he walked the halls, checking in with friends and trying to gauge the sentiment of the staff under the new administration, a buddy ran up to him and asked, “Has Frank lowered the boom on you yet?”46
The boom, as it turned out, was that DeGeorge was going to suppress the publication of a million-dollar solar conservation report that Ottinger had requested. So Hayes did the logical thing and ran out of the building. He called his secretary and told her to tell DeGeorge that he’d come down with the stomach flu and wouldn’t be able to have the meeting. Then he called his lieutenant Henry Kelly and “told him that we needed to spend the next twelve hours Xeroxing everything that he had and mailing it out to a whole bunch of distinguished reviewers,” Hayes said. “He and Carl Gawell [another author] stayed up all night copying and getting the reports in the mail.”
The next day, when Hayes got the call from DeGeorge, he feigned surprise: “‘Oh my god!’ I said. We’ve mailed it out to fifty reviewers.”47
The Reagan administration was not pleased. “His transition team was horrified by our draft report,” Rosenfeld recalled.48
SERI was allotted no funds to publish the report. Ottinger held hearings on the suppressed report and entered it into the Congressional Record.49 By that point, however, Hayes knew that the clock was ticking on his tenure in Golden. On June 23, the summer solstice of 1981, he was asked for his resignation. He composed an angry editorial to the New York Times imploring prosolar Americans to insist that solar energy “not be discriminated against.” Congress restored some of the DOE’s solar budget, but, as Hayes predicted, Reagan’s ascendancy saw “the Federal solar program quietly eclipsed.”50
The brief but grand solar experiment of the 1970s was over, and more than twenty-five years would pass before renewable energy funding would reach the levels it had enjoyed before. Solar electricity got cheaper in the intervening years, but the idea that the nation’s energy system would get a total overhaul ebbed away. Solar still contributes miniscule amounts of electricity to the nation’s grid, though the solar heat that warms every home to a greater or lesser degree goes uncounted in the official statistics.
Hayes went back to school, finished his law degree, and kept working as an activist. The years have only solidified his reputation as one of the most important and interesting environmental leaders of his time. Looking back on Hayes’s career, a 1999 Time magazine profile gave Hayes a glowing evaluation. In it, David Jackson wrote,
Where do you go when you need someone to rally 200 million people? An ex-President, perhaps, or a former dictator? Whenever the environmental movement needs someone to gather the troops worldwide, it turns to a tall, understated activist who rides his bicycle to work, wears flannel shirts and has a unique ability to herd the masses toward a common