A half hour after the first sunlight slants into the solar collectors on the roof of the University of Chicago’s physics building, the antifreeze pumping through them hits 130 degrees Fahrenheit. The hot fluid sluices through copper pipes that run into a lab and coil down through an enormous tank, where they begin to heat the water for the building. Monitors on the lab bench next to the tank continuously plot the temperature outside and the amount of sunshine falling on the collectors. Gauges on top of the tank measure the temperature of the antifreeze and water as each flows in and out. Last summer Joe O’Gallagher, a senior lecturer and executive officer of the physics department, shut off the building’s boiler so that only the collectors were heating the water for the labs and rest rooms. But the plumbing isn’t well insulated, and the water came out of the taps lukewarm. People complained, and the boiler went back on.
O’Gallagher is supposed to spend three-quarters of his time as a physics-department administrator and one-quarter doing research. But he nearly always works more than 40 hours a week, and all the extra hours go to solar.
It wasn’t until the oil crisis of the early 70s that anyone started thinking seriously again about solar. By then the U.S. was vulnerable–it was importing 36 percent of its oil, the price of which had doubled between 1970 and 1973, and it no longer had the ability to increase its own production. Then in 1973 Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The U.S. openly supplied arms to Israel, and the Arabs cut off oil shipments to us. The result was shortages, long lines at gas stations, high prices, and a furious public. But rather than blame their own shortsightedness about energy use, many Americans–including many politicians–preferred to blame oil-company conspiracies.
The growing solar market was essentially for thermal devices–water and space heaters. The market for photovoltaic collectors, which convert sunlight directly to electricity (see sidebar), didn’t really start to build until the thermal market crashed in the mid-80s. A big portion of the nation’s energy budget goes to space and water heating, which now account for almost half the energy used in commercial buildings and nearly three-quarters in residential, according to the DOE. Natural gas generates most of the energy for both kinds of heat; fuel oil and electricity pretty much split the rest. Most electricity is generated by burning coal; oil (740,000 barrels a day), nuclear, and natural gas supply the bulk of the rest. Solar clearly didn’t have the drawbacks of conventional sources–sunlight is abundant, dependable over the long term, and free. O’Gallagher calls it a democratic source of energy. “It’s available to everybody. It has no preferences. It’s very well distributed and decentralized.”
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But U.S. energy policy continued to be jerked around by foreign politics. Iran’s revolution, which began in 1978, shut down oil production there. According to Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize, that created a worldwide shortage of only 4 to 5 percent, but it was enough to set off nasty competition for the rest. The revolutionaries managed to start the oil flowing again, but then they took their American hostages, and Carter embargoed shipments to the U.S. Gas lines, public outrage, and oil-company conspiracy theories were back. The price of a barrel of oil went from $13 to $45 before settling in at $34, helping to push this country into the worst recession since the Depression.
Ronald Reagan ran against Carter promising to abolish the Department of Energy, which he called a prime example of federal waste, and to slash the budget for renewable energies. He never managed to get rid of the DOE, but in two terms he did shift the portion of the department’s budget that went to designing, testing, and producing nuclear weapons from 32 percent to 70. And he never eliminated funding for solar R & D–Congress always restored some of what he wanted to cut–but he did shrivel it. Carter had requested $707 million for the 1981 budget; Reagan wanted to shrink that by 70 percent for ’82, and Congress finally appropriated $303 million for that year. The 1988 allotment was $90 million.
The brilliance of Winston’s discovery lies in the mathematics of that parabolic curve, which allows the side walls to concentrate enough light on the absorber tube that the collector can remain stationary. Until Winston published his design no one had believed light could be concentrated without the collector being constantly pointed directly at the sun, and tracking the sun is tricky: a collector can’t be more than two or three degrees off the sun, and the mechanical devices that keep it there are expensive and often cranky.
