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But the man who could rally 200 million people couldn’t overcome even the handful in Reagan’s administration who were hell-bent on removing solar energy from the national energy debate. Perhaps no one could have.

“It was the best job I ever had; it was my one shot to reshape the world,” Hayes reminisced. “If Carter had been reelected and we had four more years, I think we would have been unstoppable.”

In the context of solar energy, the historian Frank Laird argues that “substantial enduring changes in policy require changes in the institutionalized ideas that influence policy, which can mean either changing ideas within an institution or changing which institution controls some policy.” The Solar Energy Research Institute was formed to be one of those new institutions for changing the government, but the truth is that it never had a shot. Even under solar-friendly Carter, Denis Hayes and the researchers who worked for him were never taken seriously at the highest levels of government. And when Reagan came to power, they were pushed completely to the political periphery for decades.51

In 1990 the Solar Energy Research Institute was renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The name and formal recognition as a national laboratory were new, but its researchers still were renters in those same yellowing office buildings off I-70. The dream, stretching back to 1978, of a facility that would be “a national showpiece of innovative solar energy design and energy conservation techniques” had gone unfulfilled.52

Then, in 2009 the government finally appropriated funds for the permanent building, thanks to Department of Energy chief, Steven Chu, who is closely tied to a host of green researchers through his work at the helm of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It was a sign that solar energy—in all its forms—has scratched and clawed its way back up to and past the level of respectability it once enjoyed.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s permanent building is that “showpiece,” even if it was built thirty years later than anticipated. It’s the most energy-efficient commercial building in America and shows off all the technologies and modes of analysis that have been developed at NREL and other solar-friendly institutions.

NREL’s analysts now routinely put out the types of pre-planning documents, forecasts, technology roadmaps, and promotional materials that characterized the golden age of commercial nuclear power in the late ’60s and into the 1970s. Solar and efficiency entrepreneurs and researchers finally have the institutional support long enjoyed by nuclear power and fossil fuels in America.

When the National Renewable Energy Laboratory employees moved into the new building in 2010, it became official: After thirty long years, solar is no longer a renter in the federal government. It finally owns its house.

chapter 14

The Meaning of Luz

SOLAR-CONCENTRATING TECHNOLOGY has been anointed as perhaps the most promising large-scale renewable energy source in the world. Everyone from Google’s chief climate officer to experts at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to Southern California Edison agree that if the United States is going to generate a lot of electricity from the sun, solar thermal technologies are going to be the dominant technology in the near term.

In the green-tech boom of the first decade of the twenty-first century, billions of dollars flowed into companies that said they could make electricity from the sun’s heat. By 2009 ten gigawatts, several large nuclear plants worth of capacity, were planned for the United States alone. The world’s utilities were signing deals left and right while investors poured money into the companies they thought could deliver.1

Some projects were planning to use the “parabolic trough” variant of solar thermal technology. In this, long rows of mirrors curved like oil drums cut in half concentrate the sun’s rays on a heat collecting tube, which is filled with synthetic