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It was the Winter of 1981 and the country was just beginning to feel the sharp edges of the Reagan revolution. Denis Hayes, head of the fledgling Solar Energy Research Institute, was walking through the halls of the Department of Energy when an acquaintance came up to him and said, "Has Frank lowered the boom on you yet?" The Frank in question was an acting assistant secretary, but the boom, it turned out, was falling from the top.
President Reagan had once been General Electric's most camera-ready tout, and his administration viewed alternative energy with open scorn. "They're going to kill your study," the gray-suited informant warned Hayes, before slipping down the corridor.
The study, a yearlong investigation by some of the nation's leading scientists, provided a convincing blueprint for a solar future. It showed that alternative energy could easily meet 28 percent of the nation's power needs by 2000.
The only thing that solar and wind and other nonpolluting energy sources needed was a push, the study concluded -- the
same research funding and tax credits provided to
other energy industries, and a government committed to lead the way to reduced reliance on fossil fuels. But the messenger in the corridor signaled that
the solar future would only be won with a little guerrilla warfare. Hayes phoned a colleague at his office in Golden, Colorado, and told him to
make 100 copies of the study and circulate them around the country. Energy Secretary Jim Edwards killed the study, all right, but not before it had been published in the Congressional Record."
By the end of 1985, when Congress and the administration allowed tax credits for solar homes to lapse, the dream of a solar era had faded.
The solar water heater President Carter had installed on the White House roof in 1979 was dismantled and junked. Solar water heating went from
a billion-dollar industry to peanuts overnight;
thousands of sun-minded businesses went
bankrupt. "It died. It's dead," says Peter Barnes, whose San Francisco solar- installation business had 35 employees at its peak. "First the money dried up, then the spirit dried up," says Jim Benson, another solar activist of the day."
