![]() President Obama and California Governor Jerry Brown kept the solar subsidies going, and Hillary Clinton in her 2016 Presidential run boldly upped the ante to increase solar seven-fold. In 1997, President Bill Clinton announced the Million Solar Roofs Initiative (by 2010) as part of the buildup to the international negotiation on climate change held in Kyoto, Japan. But Enron’s $150 million, 100-megawatt central-station facility in northern Nevada would never eventuate. The next year, the New York Times excitedly reported that photovoltaic rates “competitive with those of energy generated from oil, gas and coal” was finally at hand. Department of Energy, unveiled a plan to install 50 megawatts of solar cells by 2000. But with climate alarmism, solar politics and media PR reemerged. The first solar federal tax credit that year was joined by a PR moment when 32 solar panels were installed by Carter on the West Wing. Politics came to the rescue in the 1970s when oil and gas shortages from federal price controls made solar “the thing.” President Carter’s National Energy Plan of 1977 announced: “Solar hot water and space heating technology is now being used and is ready for widespread commercialization” (p. 32) was for a “solar power facility of national scope” capable of supplying a million megawatts from a 5,000 square-mile solar collector in the desert southwest. ![]() A 1971 proposal in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (October, p. The 1954 demonstration of a photovoltaic cell at Bell Telephone Laboratories brought new hopes. Micro-solar, on the other hand, would find a niche in sunny areas with water heating, as well as off the grid where plug-in power was unavailable ( offshore drilling rigs were the first major market). ![]() In 1911, Sun Power Company of Philadelphia built a 10,000-foot collector surface plant that soon proved uneconomic. But as American engineer John Ericsson noted in 1878, after numerous costly experiments: “Although the heat is obtained for nothing, so extensive, costly, and complex is the concentration apparatus that solar steam is many times more costly than steam produced by burning coal.”īut entrepreneurs kept trying. The “photoelectric effect” effect was discovered in 1839. Such caution is merited for a technology that has always been uneconomic as a grid electricity. President Biden’s Build Back Better-another subsidy lifeline for solar power-remains in legislative limbo. “Before maybe the end of this decade, I see wind and solar being cost-competitive without subsidy with new fossil fuel.” - DOE Secretary Steven Chu, 2011
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