Environment & Energy

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Federal support for renewables and solar energy increased significantly after Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976. The federal government funded programs in solar energy research and education, such as those spearheaded by Denis Hayes, a lead organizer of Earth Day in 1970 and the director of a new Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado. The 1978 Energy Tax Act also provided tax credits for residences with solar energy systems, prompting homeowners, landlords, and community organizations to experiment with domestic applications of solar energy technology. The 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) also sought to encourage the development of non-utility power producers, including renewable energy generation.

The Carter administration took other symbolic actions to promote solar energy. In 1978, President Carter declared a national “Sun Day” to celebrate solar technologies. The Carter Administration also had 32 solar panels installed on the White House in June 1979 to heat hot water for the building. “By the end of this century,” Carter declared at the 1979 installation ceremony, “I want our nation to derive 20 percent of all energy we use from the sun.” He said that the White House solar hot water heater could “either be a curiosity, a museum piece … or one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”

Despite these grand aspirations, solar energy in the 1970s also had critical limitations. Many solar technologies remained highly experimental, small scale, and unconventional in their design. They generally were not cost competitive with other sources of energy, including most fossil fuels. The latter enjoyed lenient environmental laws that allowed fossil fuel users to pollute the air and water with relatively little cost, further accentuating solar energy’s cost disadvantages.

Ronald Reagan broke sharply with Jimmy Carter over energy policy. He considered solar energy a fanciful and unpromising technology. Reagan rejected Carter’s message to the American people about energy scarcity and conservation. Where Carter asked Americans to make do with less by “living thriftily,” Reagan promised a future of energy abundance supplied by fossil fuels. After Reagan’s election in 1980, the new administration emphasized the development of domestic oil, gas, and nuclear power, and allowed the solar energy tax credits to expire while slashing funding for solar research and development. Reagan dismissed Denis Hayes and hundreds of employees of the Solar Energy Research Institute. Reagan’s vision appeared to have won the day by the mid-1980s, when global oil prices plummeted once more and helped drive many precarious solar energy ventures into bankruptcy. In 1986 the White House solar panels were unceremoniously removed from the roof and never reinstalled.

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