The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Sun Day and Solar Energy Possibilities

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Today Americans all over the country joined people in twenty-six other nations to celebrate Sun Day, to generate awareness of the possibilities in solar energy. President Carter, on a tour of the West, stopped in Denver to dedicate a national solar energy research institute. And aware of criticism that his administration isn`t pushing sun power hard enough, the President announced a cabinet-level study for a national solar strategy. He also promised twenty-five percent increase in federal spending. But is solar energy a practical alternative today to our crippling imports of oil, or just wishful thinking? That`s what we examine tonight: solar energy -- how real, how soon, how cheap? Jim Lehrer is off; Charlayne Hunter-Gault is in Washington. Charlayne?

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Robin, a solar-powered rock band, solar cooked food, and a sunrise service on a mountaintop were part of the scores of festivities hailing what some today called the dawning of the solar age. The honored guest -- the sun, that is -- failed to shine for either the President in usually sunny Colorado, or even following the Suni Indian sunrise call in Sullivan, Maine. But in places like Chicago, New York City and Washington, D. C., where crowds ranged from 500 to 1,000 or more, the sun put on a happy face. In the capital, as in other places, there was music, exhibits of solar products and speeches on the potential of new technology.

At the same time, somber notes were sounded by many of the participants, including Barry Commoner, a leading solar advocate. He told the Washington sunrise service that the solar issue was as vital as the elimination of slavery in the 1860s.In New York, United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young compared solar demonstrations of the `70s with the civil rights movement in the `60s. A sign of international support for solar power came in full-page ads in the Washington Post and the New York Times by Saudi Arabia, the leading exporter o of to the United States. The a read in part, "We share America`s increased awareness of the potential of solar energy, not only for our two nations but for all the people of the world."

MacNEIL: The man who directed the Sun Day program is Denis Hayes, chairman of the board of Solar Action. Mr. Hayes was also the planner behind Earth Day back in 1970. Currently a senior researcher with World watch Institute, a non-profit research organization, Mr. Hayes is with us tonight in the studios of the Georgia Educational Television Network in Atlanta. Mr. Hayes, those are some pretty powerful things that were said about the need for solar energy -- as vital as ending slavery, the equivalent of the civil rights movement. Do you really see it as that serious?

DENIS HAYES: I certainly see our current energy dilemma as having some vitally important components. One will choose different metaphors for different audiences, and I`m not sure that I would have chosen either of those two.

MacNEIL: Well, let me put one to you, not a metaphor but a description that you used before today`s event. You said it was going to be the biggest planned event in American history. Was it?

HAYES: We certainly had the potential. I`m afraid that I`ve been dashing around the country and haven`t had a chance to see any nationally aggregated figures. We had good planning organizations involving a variety of different constituencies -- labor, environmentalists, consumers, business, academics -- operating in more than 600 major cities and in thousands of smaller communities. I have a hunch that it may well have been.

MacNEIL: I don`t want to be flippant about this, but is there some symbolism to you in the fact that the sun didn`t come out in a couple of places where it needed to?

HAYES: (Laughing.) It`s symbolism, but it`s sort of positive symbolism. People too frequently tend to think of solar energy in terms of flat-plate collectors on people`s roofs, whereas in fact solar energy en compasses hydropower and wind power and the growing of crops for energy, and for all those things rain is a very essential thing. We enjoyed rain and anticipated that it would be raining some places.

MacNEIL: And it is right there in Atlanta, I gather.

HAYES: And it is right here in Atlanta.

MacNEIL: Seriously, is the purpose behind this mass movement you`ve started to organize to educate people or, much more politically, to push Mr. Carter into some more federal action?

HAYES: Well, clearly the two cannot be divided. The purpose today was an educational purpose. We wanted to get people out putting their hands on specific pieces of technology so that they could see how it could in fact begin to play a role in their lives. But by getting millions of people to do that we`re putting a human face -- and a voter`s face -- upon those polls that say that eighty percent of Americans favor solar energy. And whenever you start associating in the minds of politicians, particularly Congressmen, who are going to be standing for re-election in a few months, large numbers of people who are interested in a topic, that topic receives a far higher priority in their legislative agenda.

MacNEIL: I take it you don`t think Mr. Carter is doing enough. He said today that by the end of next year they`d be spending half a billion dollars a year, $500 million. Isn`t that quite a lot?

HAYES: Well, (laughing) no one can say that a half a billion dollars isn`t very much money. That was not a budgetary adjustment. What the President did was he said we`re going to be spending in the Department of Energy $400 million, and we have proposed a tax credit that, if Congress passes the National Energy Act, could in fact return to taxpayers a credit amounting to $100 million. That`s exactly where his program stood some months ago. There`s no change in it. A half a billion dollars appears, of course, to be a substantial amount of money, but the federal energy budget approaches $13 billion this year, meaning that that solar energy portion of it is only a small percentage -- between three and four percent.

MacNEIL: And your point is, the percentage is too small, is that it?

HAYES: The percentage is too small in terms of concrete terms for this year, Robert, but also if you look at this thing historically, the federal government has invested more than $144 billion now -- $144 billion -- promoting centralized technologies. A half a billion now to pro mote decentralized technologies. Those technologies that are the brightest hope, I think, for the nation`s energy future certainly have to viewed as two- level.

MacNEIL: Just to get that point clear, you`re not, then, advocating centralized technology for solar energy but a lot of little local technologies, is that what you mean?

HAYES: Well, I don`t think it has to be an either/or, but certainly in the past the American solar program has had a disproportionate emphasis on large, highly centralized projects, and that is one of the things that the Carter administration has begun to remedy. They`ve now recognized that we have to move as a nation away from concentrating upon what are termed engineering efficiencies, engineering economies, of scale -the things that you can build bigger and hence make them less expensive -- and move increasingly into the economies of mass production --getting a lot of little things, but doing them less expensively than a handful of big things.

MacNEIL: Okay. Well, thank you. We`ll come back. In the meantime, let`s look at some of the projects that have been springing up around the country in response to the strains caused by the 1973 OPEC oil embargo and price increase. While the majority of large solar projects are being built and planned for the South and Southwest, the development of solar energy has not been limited to the so-called Sunbelt. WGBH reporter Art Cohen took a look at the work of some scientists, inventors and tinkerers in the Boston area.

ART COHEN, WGBH, Reporting: Solar heat is touted by some as the salvation of New England. Energy from the sun is free, but skeptics say the technology needed to capture and use it is still too expensive to be practical. Tell that to Bob and Nancy Pitman of Tewkesbury, who have designed and built a solar home from scratch. The solar installation is not yet complete, but when it is it will produce about half the home`s heat and hot water from sunlight. The clincher -- this solar installation adds just a few thousand dollars to the price of the house. And it is by no means the only solar hot water and heating installation in Massachusetts.

But it isn`t just homeowners who are heating with solar; industry is, too. New England Telephone has installed solar in two of its buildings. This installation in Acton will provide about thirty percent of the heat for the main part of the building. And engineers from Bell Labs are evaluating the system to see if it can be adapted to the Bell System`s 10,000 buildings nationwide. The phone company is even thinking of using the sun to provide electricity to operate the switching equipment. Appropriately enough, the Massachusetts Audubon Society has also gotten into the act. It has installed a huge solar demonstration project at its headquarters in Lincoln. The system will supply thirty to fifty percent of the heat for the building. All of these installations use conventional solar technology, and that is expensive. At current energy prices, the average installation will take at least ten years to pay for itself. But future technology promises to be cheaper, and in fact may already be here.

MIT engineers unveiled a small experimental classroom building which will get eighty percent of its heat from the sun. The materials used in the heating system cost only $1,500 and should be available to the public within a year. The entire building acts as a solar collector. Large windows on the south side of the building let in the sunlight. Venetian blinds, with a mirror coating on the top, reflect the sunlight up to the ceiling. A special salt mixture in the ceiling tiles absorbs the heat. At night, when there is no light striking the ceiling, the heat stored in the salt mixture radiates back into the room. And the windows of the building consist of a newly developed plastic material embedded between panes of glass, which makes the windows better insulators.

TIMOTHY JOHNSON, MIT: For February we found that we`re getting about sixty percent of our heat supplied by the sun. This, of course, is one of our coldest months, and over the whole heating season we expect to get about eighty percent, on average, of our heat supplied by the sun.

MacNEIL: The reporter on that piece was Art Cohen from Station WGBH in Boston. The solar heating concept used there is a variation of one of the most common technologies used to get energy from the sun: simply solar heating. Scientists are working on a number of other methods to harness the sun`s power. Electricity can be directly generated from the sun by using panels with chips -- usually made of silicone -- which transform sunlight into electricity. So far this form of power is still quite expensive and is not a commercially viable alternative to existing energy sources. Scientists are also working to convert organic matter, such as solid waste, into usable fuel. This process, known as biomass conversion, works on the principle of photosynthesis. Since heat from the sun creates the temperature variations that cause wind, scientists have lumped development of modern windmills under the solar heading.

The majority of existing solar projects involves solar-thermal heat creation, using the sun to heat water for a variety of uses. Yesterday marked the official start of one of the largest privately financed commercial applications of solar energy, a solar-thermal project at the Anheuser-Busch Brewery in Jacksonville, Florida. This half million dollar project is designed to support hot water to pasteurize beer. More than 4,000 collector tubes have been put in stands on the brewery roof. The tubes are filled with water that the sun heats to temperatures ranging from 160-240 degrees Fahrenheit. Once heated, the water is pumped into thermal capacitors, pipes filled with a solution that, in laymens` language, transfers the heat from the solar-heated water to the solution in the pipes. That solution is led into the brewery, where it`s used to heat water used to pasteurize beer. Bottled beer is carried by conveyor belts into the pasteurizer, where it`s washed in the water heated by the sun. The hot water creates the pasteurization inside the bottles.

The brewery`s push towards solar was strongly encouraged by Anheuser Busch President August Busch. Mr. Busch, aside from his corporate duties, is vice chairman of the National Center for Resource Recovery. Mr. Busch, why did you invest in solar?

AUGUST BUSCH: At Jacksonville, as we have just seen, we have an online production research project. We put it there -- and we put it there with our own money -- so that we could get it in operation as quickly as possible. Over a period of about a year and a half our research and putting together the hardware is what it took to get it into operation. We did it so that we could gain the technology that we think is necessary as we look at our 1980 and 1990 fuel availability and the price of the fuels that we use in the production of our products, so ...

MacNEIL: Excuse me. You say you did it yourselves so you could do it quickly. What does that mean, you didn`t want to wait for the government to help you do it?

BUSCH: As you well know, government grants are available, and they`re becoming, I hope, increasingly available. But to be able to get one the time frame necessary is probably in excess of two years, and we didn`t think that we could wait that long.

MacNEIL: I see. Is this an experiment, in your view, or a commercial venture, or don`t you know yet?

BUSCH: It`s both. It is on-line, it is producing on a daily basis, but needless to say, it is there more to gather data than it is to actually save energy today. Tomorrow we hope that will be a different story.

MacNEIL: Do you yet have an assessment -- I mean, you`ve got to run a business -- do you have an assessment whether solar power is cost-efficient for you or not?

BUSCH: On a direct cost basis, replacing fossil fuels with solar energy in our production operation, direct cost basis, it is economical. If you take depreciation into consideration, because of the cost of the hardware that`s on the roof and the rest of the processing equipment, it is not economical today.

MacNEIL: Because you`ve already got the stuff to burn oil, and you have to put in the stuff to do the solar.

BUSCH: Additional capital investment, which is high today.

MacNEIL: You`ve heard what Mr. Hayes in Atlanta said. Do you think the government is doing enough, fast enough, big enough?

BUSCH:I think Mr. Hayes had a very good point when he mentioned that only two or three percent of the budget is pointed in the direction of solar energy. We would think that if the government machinery was greased somewhat more so that industry could go to government and get faster action for projects, there might be a lot more interest at the level of the production company to be able to put in these operations. It just takes too long today and it`s too complicated and you don`t know soon enough whether you can proceed.

MacNEIL: Do you have any sense yet, as a businessman -- have your experts given you a kind of projection -- of where you could be, if you really went into it with solar energy, in ten years` or twenty years` time?

BUSCH: After the project that we have just discussed here in Jacksonville, we are right now applying for a government grant this time to get into a project with the General Electric Company at Busch Gardens in Tampa, Florida to supply heat and air conditioning in the operations there at the Gardens. We are also looking at one in Southern California to refrigerate a production warehouse. We may get government grants -- we hope we can; but if we don`t we`ll probably go ahead and take a look at those two applications ourselves.

MacNEIL: Part of your consideration must be, presumably, that although oil is expensive now it can probably only get more expensive.

BUSCH: If oil follows the inflation rate today, solar energy may not be viable. If oil goes up higher than the inflation rate projected today, it most certainly will be viable, and we just can`t take a chance in not knowing the technology and the costs; and we have to do that and we have to do it today.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Charlayne?

HUNTER-GAULT: The first place the sun rises in this country is in Maine, so very early this morning about 500 people climbed up Cadillac Mountain to get a good look at it. One of them was Congressman James Jef fords, Republican of Vermont. As a member of an active lobbying movement, Solar Coalition, Congressman Jeffords has been a chief sponsor of solar legislation. He is also House chairman of the Environmental Study Conference. Congressman Jeffords, yesterday the House passed a $36.7 million bill to provide loans to small companies involved in solar energy and energy conservation. Can we deduce from that that there is a pro-solar sentiment on the Hill?

Rep. JAMES JEFFORDS: You bet there is. They`re getting along with the people much faster than the administration is. They recognize it, they`re out Sun Day, today, seeing what`s going on in their own districts, and they know that the people are much further ahead on this subject than the administration is right now.

HUNTER-GAULT: Well, what about opposition? One of your former colleagues, Democrat Allan Howe, who`s now an energy lobbyist, said recently that there are members of Congress who will not accept the fact that solar energy is here now.

JEFFORDS: Well, that`s very true. The Solar Coalition, which I`m a part of and which several of us started a year ago, though it`s grown from about six members when we started to over eighty, the phone was ringing off today with people trying to get on so they could say they were on the Solar Coalition. We made our first breakthrough...

HUNTER-GAULT: You think that was because of the media coverage of the event?

JEFFORDS: Oh, you bet it was. They were reading the Post and the Times and all the others and watching the television, listening to the radio. They realize that the people are there, and politically they want to be with them. And the people, I think, are smart in this area.

HUNTER-GAULT: All right. You said a few minutes ago that the Congress seemed to be a little bit ahead of the President. Do you feel that there`s opposition there, or not enough support, or what?

JEFFORDS: Well, really the only backing we got for solar energy out of the White House so far is wind power and rhetoric. It really hasn`t been much. In fact, it was an incredibly stupid mistake, I think, for them this year to come in with a budget request which was less than Congress appropriated last year. In each of the ten areas where we still need research and development breakthroughs they came in less -- at least, according to the GAO report -- than is necessary to keep ongoing projects in.

HUNTER-GAULT: Then you weren`t reassured in any way by the President message today?

JEFFORDS: Not by the figures he gave us. I was reassured to a certain extent by the fact that at least he knows there`s a problem and he`s getting it reviewed. But I certainly wasn`t reassured to have Mr. Schlesinger, who I consider very pro-nuclear and who I also think considers people who are interested in solar energy as some kind of weirdo`s, he just doesn`t think there`s any potential there. And if he`s the one that`s going to direct our energy policy -- and if you see the budget cuts were made, just recommendations from his own people, before the package came out, you realize we`ve got to have a change of mind with Mr. Schlesinger before we`re going to get any real move.

HUNTER-GAULT: Thank you. The amount of money being proposed for solar energy by the administration, as well as how that money is going to be used, is a matter of some debate. About three fourths of the proposed $400 million budget is earmarked for research and development. As Director of Solar Technology, Dr. Henry Marvin oversees the Energy Department`s research and development projects. Dr. Marvin, you`ve just heard a lot of criticism about what`s going on with the administration and its commitment. Do you feel that there`s a firm commitment there from the administration?

Dr. HENRY MARVIN: The commitment that I was delighted to see today was the commitment the President made to the Domestic Policy Council review, scheduled for completion on the first of September. I think that the real discussion that goes on here with regard to solar has to do with the question of a banker`s view of how one handles future investments as opposed to the view of those who look at the societal impacts of solar energy as opposed to some of the other energies. One says, "move very rapidly," and the other says, "move cautiously." And of course, the administration has been following the cost-effectiveness type of measure with regard to solar installations.

HUNTER-GAULT: Well, can you do anything in terms of any real significant progress with solar now with the amount of money that the President is talking about?

MARVIN: Well, if you remember. that we started just three years ago the Division of Solar Energy was formed just three years ago in August -and in that period of time we have done a good deal; many of the things you saw earlier are things that we`ve had a hand in. So I think that we have moved. Certainly it`s possible to move faster. The question is, is that the appropriate thing for the country to do? And that`s precisely what that Policy Council review is meant to get to.

HUNTER-GAULT: Well, what about the quote I just read to the Congress man about the former House member who said that solar energy is here and now and something ought to be done now about it?

MARVIN: The first statement is not much different from what the President said in Golden, that solar energy is here now. And I think perhaps that`s the best statement to make with regard to the past three or four years, that three years ago the question was, could solar energy play a major role in energy in this country? The answer today is, without question, it can. The question is, how rapidly?

HUNTER-GAULT: Okay. In terms of the budget, though, and just briefly, has the budget been cut, as some Congressmen have said it has?

MARVIN: The difference in view is this: the President indicated, of course, that it had gone up $100 million, and the Congressman has indicated that the budget didn`t go up, actually it went down a little. The solar heating program is the crux of this; in that case we have carried through many programs and feel that we have come to the point where the government is interfering with the progress the industry is making, and therefore have shifted to a tax incentive recommendation. A tax incentive has not yet been passed; it`s part of the national energy plan which is before Congress at this oint.That would mean that the budget would be $500 million instead of 400 million if that many people started houses and asked for the tax incentive.

HUNTER-GAULT: I see. Thank you. Robin?

MacNEIL: Let`s go back to Mr. Hayes in Atlanta. Mr. Hayes, listening to what we`ve just heard from the administration position, asking the question, is it appropriate to go ahead much more rapidly, let me ask you: nobody`s really against solar energy, it seems; it`s just a question of how rapidly and how much resources one puts into it. Does it make sense to crash in with huge federal programs when the technology is still a bit uncertain and the economic viability a bit uncertain, or would it make sense to proceed at a more sort of deliberate pace and improve through research that technology?

HAYES: Well, I think you certainly have to improve through research those parts of the technology that can benefit from increased research, but the principal economics, the economic difficulties that some solar technologies now face, are problems of it being a cottage industry. And the key thing is to build the market, to build it as rapidly as possible, to start getting economies of mass production, and then make the equipment available to individual people. That`s why, for example, we hope that the President today might be announcing a major federal procurement effort for things like photo voltaic cells and wind turbines and even solar collectors. If you start making a lot of these things, then they`re going to be cheaper for everybody, just as if you start making a lot of anything it`s going to be cheaper.

MacNEIL: Dr. Marvin, I was going to ask you to react to Mr. Hayes there, that he`s indicating that if we could procure a great deal more of the materials that are now in a cottage industry state, one could move ahead with the technology that exists.

MARVIN: With the photo voltaic industry, for example, we have moved in that direction and have published a plan of action for the next eight years to do just exactly that. In the case of the solar collectors for thermal use as opposed to houses, we don`t yet know well enough what the collectors would be, and are really engaged in a test program at this point to identify what collectors the industry should build. Now, clearly, the industry should make that decision, in any case.

MacNEIL: Congressman Jeffords, do you think that`s the situation as you see it, that more research is needed even in things like solar collectors?

JEFFORDS: Oh, I think we need both. I think we still need some more research and development, but I agree with Mr. Hayes that now is the time to develop our commercialization by having the federal government provide a market.

MacNEIL: Let me just get this straight. I wonder whether you`re advising your voters and constituents, with all this enthusiasm going on through Sun Day and everything, to rush out and actually install solar energy now, or should they wait and see until it`s known which ones are more efficient, which ones are cheaper, and so on?

JEFFORDS: Well, I`m advocating a caveat emptor policy with respect to that. There is some good technology which is available now which can be used in my good state of Vermont and should be used by people. But there are also a lot of systems around that haven`t been tested sufficiently to be sure about them, so one must move very cautiously. But I think it`s time now, through the tax incentives which the President has proposed -- and I commend him for that -- and through the federal government making the procurements necessary to build the markets. Now, we this morning, I believe, had a press conference indicating that the House office buildings ought to be put into solar energy, and we could save a lot of money doing it. With the federal government setting the example, some of the problems which were previously referred to -- and that is the public`s concern and not really being sure about these --would disappear.

MacNEIL: Mr. Busch, you`re in industry -- you`re not in the solar industry, but just looking at from industry`s point of view -- if the technology were certain enough and the applicability of it certain enough, there would be money to be made there. Why isn`t industry rushing out to make it?

BUSCH:I don`t think we have enough of the answers today to be able to say that the efficiencies are there and the bottom-line economics are there. I would think that the tax incentives that were spoken of a moment ago are key for industry and for the consumer, because if those were given, the demand for the solar hardware would increase. And one of the things that was just discussed, increase in demand, would mean more production of those pieces of hardware and lower costs, benefiting the entire system.

MacNEIL: So Mr. Hayes, to come back to you as the real solar energy pusher on the program...

(Laughter.)

MacNEIL: Would you concede that perhaps a little caution until we`re a little further down the line is advisable?

HAYES: Certainly. Whenever anybody buys anything, he`s well advised -- whenever anybody purchases anything he`s well advised to know just as much about. it beforehand as possible and to deal with someone that he feels he can rely upon. I think the crucial problem here is that when we`re buying most of our energy sources we are paying average prices for them. We`re paying for the average cost of electricity that pulls in the cheap hydroelectricity built in the 1930s, the relatively cheap coal that`s built in the 1940s and `50s, the relatively cheap nuclear power that came in in the early 1960s, and we`re forgetting that where you really should make those decisions is at the margin. Today if you`re going to get electricity for a 100-watt bulb in your house at the margin from the new power plant, somebody has to invest $3,000 in transmission facilities and new power plant for that 100-watt bulb. What we`re talking about doing with tax credits and other different shifts in the financial mechanisms is to shift some of that financing so that the individual homeowner can build the things and purchase them in his own...

MacNEIL: We have to leave it there, Mr. Hayes. I`m sorry to interrupt you. Thank you for joining us this evening, and thank you, gentlemen in Washington. Good night, Charlayne.

HUNTER-GAULT: Good night, Robin.

MacNEIL: Thank you, Mr. Busch. That`s all for tonight. We`ll be back tomorrow night. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.