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Why America Doesn't Have A Respectable Solar Industry

Solar power in America is nothing new ?Californians were powering water-heaters with it back in 1908 ?we抳e just generally ignored it since WWII. Powering the Future explains how we managed to squander this energy for nearly 75 years.

You could be excused for thinking that there is no history of what we call green technology. Conventional wisdom holds that solar and wind are new, geothermal has barely been tried, and efficiency begins tomorrow. Perhaps some hippies toyed with off-grid living in the ?0s, and maybe a few windmills once creaked on your great grandfather抯 farm. General Motors killed the electric car, too, right?

To those who remember a few facts from the past, green tech is an engineering bust that has been given ample opportunity to prosper, but has only succeeded in failing spectacularly. There抯 almost no institutional memory of what happened before the energy crises of the ?0s, and little of what happened technologically during that time has been documented in any serious way. Far more people know about the demise of the spotted owl than about any solar, wind, wave, water, or geo-thermal project.

Nonetheless, some remnants of the past endure. Way back when I started researching my book, when I typed the word 搒olar?into the search box of the American Memory collection on the Library of Congress Web site, I got one good search result: 揇eath Valley Ranch, Solar Heater, Death Valley Junction vicinity, Inyo county, CA.?Three black-and-white photos show a rotting wooden building on a concrete foundation maybe 60 feet long and nine feet wide, taller in the back than the front. It抯 covered in copper metal coils that are painted black and snake back and forth. Behind it a tall cylinder, wrapped in felt made from cattle hair and what looks like aluminium foil, rises 20 feet into the air. The entire scene is surrounded by desert-cactus, rock, sand, sky. The caption reads, 揟he Solar Heater at Death Valley Ranch is a rare surviving example of a solar industry that thrived in Southern California before World War II and before the widespread use of natural gas.?

There was a flourishing solar industry in California before World War II? If solar heater worked, why did people stop using them?

The history is long and deep, but criminally obscure. It抯 understandable; victors don抰 only write the history in military battles. The popular view of technology is that the best one wins. We assume that alternatives did not exist or that, if they did, they were obviously and irreversibly inferior to the options that were chosen. It抯 as if no one had ever heard of Microsoft Windows or Betamax.

Survey the range of discoveries, inventions, industries, and large-scale systems that have arisen during the past century and notice which paths in modern technology have been selected. You抣l find good ideas that were dropped and bad ideas that were probably better forgotten. Some real alternatives to technologies we抳e selected merely lacked funding and scale, not technical sophistication. In 1900 people could use the sun to heat the water for a shower. They could drive across New York City in an electric taxicab. Even if these cabs did not work perfectly, they existed before most people even had a single light bulb in their home. In 1945 a person could have purchased a solar house or gone to see the one-megawatt wind turbine. During the 1970s one could have visited the Solar Energy Research Institute and, 10 years later, seen the massive solar fields of the Mojave Desert. Green technology has been a viable set of technologies for more than one hundred years but, regardless, supplies little of America抯 energy. So why weren抰 those alternatives selected at the time? Could any be reclaimed now?




Author: Haining SunSurf New Energy Technology Co., Ltd
website:www.sunsurf.com.cn
main product: solar heater,solar energy

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