Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values (review)

Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values. By Frank N. Laird. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvii+248. $54.95.

In this compact volume, Frank Laird asks why solar energy, whose future seemed bright during the energy crises of the 1970s, never attracted lasting governmental commitment. Laird contends that its advocates failed to persuade key policymakers that solar could solve the energy problem as they defined it. He succeeds on the most important criterion: his analysis of solar history seems correct. Nevertheless, because he writes as an institutional analyst, with corresponding goals, his treatment may frustrate historians of technology and energy professionals, who read for different reasons.

As Laird recounts, American policymakers retained a stable notion of the nation's energy problem from the Truman administration until the 1970s, seeking to increase prosperity while protecting national security. Solar energy pioneers accepted that framework, debating whether solar could forestall resource shortages and increase energy independence. Then, in the 1970s, solar advocacy separated into two camps. Conventional advocates--such as Aden and Marjorie Meinel, who imagined huge, centralized solar powerplants in the desert--continued to view solar as "simply another fuel to plug into the existing energy system, carrying no implications for social or political change" (p. 117), important for its infinite availability and invulnerability to embargo. In contrast, ecological advocates "promoted solar energy technology because they also favored certain ways of life and social and political institutions, such as environmental sustainability or community self-reliance" (p. 125). These included Denis Hayes, the student organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970, and Amory Lovins, who ignited a fiery debate in 1977 with his description of an alternative "soft energy path."

Although solar advocates gained access to influential policymakers--Lovins conferred with President Carter, and Carter had solar panels installed on top of the White House--solar never became a serious focus of American policy, and the ecological critique of American energy policy never gained appreciable traction. As Laird notes, Carter's administration rejected solar well before President Reagan's staff scrapped the rooftop panels.

Ultimately, however, Laird has only a limited interest in the solar story per se. His true goal is to explore "the dynamic interrelationships of ideas, interests and institutions" (p. 2). His target is pluralism, the analytic perspective suggesting that constituencies drive policy. Solar energy, Laird notes, did have a constituency, and advocates did enjoy access to policymakers. Nonetheless, those advocates failed to alter the "problem frame" defined by key decision makers. The piece missing from pluralist analyses is ideas: "pluralism must, to explain events adequately, incorporate the importance of ideas, normative and empirical, being institutionalized into official problem frames" (p. 183).

Laird's focus on ideas, while academically worthy and ultimately successful, may leave his account seeming flat to historians. He never succeeds in conveying how historical actors saw the world or why they made decisions as they did. This reflects his research: Laird cites impressive archival investigations, but no interviews. (Nor does he include some widely available contextual information, such as Carter's background in nuclear engineering.) This omission is regrettable, as many of the figures he discusses remain active. Hayes and Lovins, for example, continue in the "ideas and access" game. The former recently directed Earth Day 2000 and advised Ralph Nader's presidential campaign, while the latter hand-delivered his latest treatise, Natural Capitalism, to President Clinton. Both give insightful interviews. Such contacts, while not to be taken at face value, might have leavened the dusty memos and scribbled marginalia that Laird documents so well.

Likewise, Laird shows little interest in the shape of solar technology and the opportunities it appeared to present. He never explains what "solar" energy is to his historical actors, to him, or to his readers--although he implies that the term includes all those technologies today characterized as renewable, whether or not they directly involve the sun. More concern with technology might have stimulated a...