Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [96]
Further problems occurred with collectors, tanks, valves, pipes, pumps, flow meters, heat exchangers, and “systems installed without thought given to fluid expansion” or improper air pressure, and a dozen other things.
What’s more, a lot of the problems did “not become apparent until the system” had been operating for a while. As a consumer, it was clearly a bad situation, as Baldwin recognized in 1980 in noting that the new solar industry was “a strange mixture of dedicated ineptitude, cool professionalism, and fraud. Right now, it’s pretty hard to sort it all out—so many of the companies involved are small and local that investigating each one is virtually impossible.”27 If the spiritual leaders of the movement could not navigate the waters, what was anyone else going to do?
Solar technologies were not the only products that suffered from these problems. In the concluding story in their book, Design for a Limited Planet, which sold 100,000 copies in the mid 1970s, Jon Naar and Norma Skurka relate the story of the installation of a Jacobs wind machine atop a dilapidated tenement on New York’s Lower East Side. The triumphant story, filled with photos of happy people of color, instructs that the building “has become a model for other homesteading efforts in poverty areas, particularly where landlords abandon buildings because of escalating maintenance costs.”28 The tenants, along with massive infusions of activists, successfully fought Consolidated Edison for the right to sell their excess electricity supply back to the grid. Their case even attracted the attention of Ted Kennedy in Congress, who called the turbine atop the building, “the little windmill that could.” Wind historian Robert Righter declared it “a symbol people need not be entirely reliant upon centralized utility monopolies.”29
However, according to a 2008 New York Times article that looked back on the building’s legacy, the windmill never worked very well. “Either wind speeds were too low to generate sufficient power or turbulence from gusts produced a deafening noise from the windmill and caused the building to shake,” we learn. During a blackout, the windmill couldn’t even provide light for common areas. After about ten years of this off-and-on service, it broke in what the Times describes as a hurricane.30
This type of thing led to some harsh condemnations. “To the pragmatic observer . . . who is interested in solving problems, AT has little to offer,” Rybcynski wrote in 1978. “It is a movement that is long on polemics and pitifully short on actual accomplishments.”31 The lesson that many learned in the late ’70s was that environmentalists were a lot better at stopping stuff from getting built than building it themselves.32
But appropriate technology’s legacy is not as negative as some would suggest. They laid the groundwork for many of the eco-businesses that rose during the 1990s and provided a valuable training ground for many of today’s senior green-tech contributors. The very idea of beating the bad technologies with good stuff was, in itself, powerful. “These designers wanted to fight fire with fire,” Kirk has concluded. “They wanted to resist technocracy and frightening nuclear and military technology by placing the power of small-scale, easily understood, appropriate technology in the hands of anyone willing to listen.” In lining out such a program, they made a valiant effort toward “reenvisioning environmental activism from the ground up.”33
If they failed to create a true alternative society, their ideas still spread into existing institutional