Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [98]
Their attitude, shared with the broader environmental movement, toward other big-budget solar research was even more negative. Ray Reece’s book The Sun Betrayed: A Report on the Corporate Seizure of U.S. Solar Energy Development is a monument to the feeling that government money was going to the wrong projects and that the Exxons of the world were doing more to stifle the development of solar energy than to help it.
Certainly, the government’s record of supporting small enterprises with research funds was deplorable during the time when lots of money was available for solar research. The vast majority of funds disbursed by the Department of Energy and its predecessor, the Energy Research and Development Agency, went to large corporations like Lockheed and Exxon.
Reece records a Denver scientist, Jerry Plunkett, telling a Senate committee in 1975 that “we don’t have to have college professors tell us what the intensity of the sun is or that solar energy is a workable system. . . . There are workable systems on people’s homes and no need for gathering research data.”5 The problems with solar energy, Plunkett said, required business innovators, not researchers.
It would be abundantly clear by the early 1980s that much, much more research was actually necessary to create wind and solar energy systems that were reliable, but few solar supporters wanted to believe that. Reece himself, following the Austin, Texas, solar pioneers he knew, was furious about the way R&D funding was allocated. The social revolution that some imagined would naturally result from solar technology itself was not happening. For them, the big companies who moved in and bought up the small solar companies were at fault. They reduced solar from a liberatory technology to another product line.
In describing the reasons why the Department of Energy gave the grants to the big companies, Reece actually made the case for exactly why big businesses were needed. They might not have been the perfect vehicles for funding, but they had the resources to pursue the kind of grinding industrial research that had made all kinds of technologies viable through the years. Reece thundered that
[corporations’] advantage over smaller “competitors” is obvious: tremendous capital resources and control over raw materials, established factories and dealer networks, brand-name identification, unlimited advertising budgets, and high-level access to government R&D funds. That should be quite sufficient to assure the giants whatever degree of hegemony over the new solar market they desire. Indeed, most of those very corporate attributes are cited by government planners as justification for transferring the nation’s solar R&D program to the large corporations, the presumption being only they, in concert with the utilities, have the wherewithal to execute the “commercial development” of solar energy in the United States.6
And Reece was not alone in his anger about the “corporate elite.” Steve Baer often launched vehement attacks on corporations’ technological approaches. Baer described his experience with the International Solar Energy Society in a Mother Earth News article in 1976. He wrote,
Everybody there would be talking about sophisticated collectors and tracking systems and very exotic and expensive surfaces that were marginally more efficient absorbers of the sun’s rays and multi-million-dollar research projects. And, usually, the guys doing all the talking didn’t have a working prototype of anything they were spouting off about.7
We can only imagine what Baer would have said about a solar company owned by Exxon, but we know