A Political Football

Why do we in the clean-energy field have to doubt the intentions of our elected leaders, who should already know how our nation would benefit if we were to make a real commitment to widespread use of solar power? We’ve been relentlessly beating them over the head with facts and figures—the massive job creation that solar adoption would bring about, the significant savings on our energy bills, the huge reduction in pollution, and ultimately the increased independence from foreign oil as we move our mobility to electric vehicles. And why has there been so much resistance from many of our leaders in taking solid next steps? The answer, in short, is politics.

Perhaps this is best shown in a potted tour of the United States’ flirtations with a real solar-energy strategy. Let’s start with the energy crisis of the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter was in office, just 15 years after photovoltaic cells were invented. Back then our conflict with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) caused a shortage of gas and an alarming surge in gas prices. Carter led a campaign for energy conservation and efficiency—bundled up in his sweater while encouraging America to turn down the thermostat—and held up a fist as he declared that the energy struggle was “the moral equivalent of war.” In today’s energy struggle, we hear an eerie echo of his concerns as we risk actual war due to the continued crisis of our oil dependency in the Straits of Hormuz, our supply line of Middle Eastern oil. To combat fuel shortages and their devastating costs to the public, Carter created the Department of Energy and a national energy policy, which was quite positive, including direction on price control and development of new technologies, especially wind and solar power.

Perhaps one of the most innovative moments in his presidency was when he had solar panels installed on the White House to heat water for the building. In the speech to mark the occasion, he talked about the fork in the road that America had reached on its energy journey, and he imagined what the panels would someday say about this era in the nation’s history. The technology could end up “a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken,” he said, “or it could be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people—harnessing the power of the sun.”

Sure enough, those solar hot-water modules were taken down during the next presidency, Ronald Reagan’s, despite the fact that they were working perfectly, providing 1,000 square meters of solar-collecting surface that saved the White House $1,000 per year on its energy bill. When one of Reagan’s people was asked why, the spokesperson responded that solar panels were “not a technology befitting a superpower.” Apparently, acceptable superpower technology to Reagan meant lifting the ban on commercial processing of nuclear fuel—thus widening the playing field for nuclear power, despite the Three Mile Island disaster that had just occurred—and attempting to open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. But straight, efficient, and sustainable sunlight? Nah, believed Reagan and his people—that stuff’s for wimps.

This is just one example of how solar has become a political football. Partisan politics has attempted to muddle the real benefits of solar energy for America and for all people. When an incoming administration belonging to one political party deems an energy technology unsuitable for the stature of the nation just a few years after the previous president, who was of another political party, pronounced the technology a sign of the future, we can guess we’re headed into a negative spiral of silly rhetoric and irrationality. But get this: the administration of George W. Bush—a staunch Republican, like his hero Reagan—put solar back on the White House. He had the National Parks people, who run the place, install the panels on a maintenance shed behind the building to power the White House grounds and the swimming pool’s hot tub, but they had to do it while the president was out of town lest he be seen as reversing the Reagan-era doctrine against solar on the grounds.