reagan was "making a statement" about Carter's solar panels..just like he ditched the CAFE standards for cars..
He-man reagan believed that cheap oil was here to stay, and coal was the way to get power..
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/03/solar.htmlProdigal Sun
News: Solar energy was a rising star in the '70s -- until it was banished by the powers that be. Are we ready for its return?
By Arthur Allen
March/April 2000 Issue
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.
It was a bold gesture, but not enough to alter the outcome. The quashed study proved to be the beginning of the end. The budget for the solar institute -- which President Jimmy Carter had created to spearhead solar innovation -- was slashed from $124 million in 1980 to $59 million in 1982. Scientists who had left tenured university jobs to work under Hayes were given two weeks notice and no severance pay. The squelching of the institute -- later partly re-funded and renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory -- marked the start of Reagan's campaign against solar power. 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.
Today solar and other renewable alternatives provide barely five percent of America's energy. The solar-powered present never arrived, postponed by opposition from big utility companies, government support that favored oil and nuclear, and unproven solar technology that left the entire concept of solar energy open to ridicule. The story of what happened to solar during that first, failed revolution is more than a footnote to forgotten history. It provides a primer for the current resurgence in alternative energy, an indication of what we can expect from solar power in the decades ahead. Although the solar panels came off the White House 14 years ago, the sun continues to shine, an obvious reminder of natural hope, bathing the earth in enough heat and light every hour to provide the world's energy needs for a year. It brightens the sulfuric haze above coal-fired power plants, splinters into psychedelic spectra in smoggy sunsets, reflects off the concrete cooling towers of Three Mile Island and Trojan. It powers highway signs and wristwatches and more than a million homes and offices and schools, fueling a worldwide industry that has grown from $150 million in 1990 to $1.2 billion in 1998.
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