The Great White Hope

A Close Look at the Great White Hope Solar Energy Where It Is and Where It's Going

Maybe what's needed is one of those slick Madison Avenue type ad campaigns. The bumper stickers could be plastered on every car with pithy questions like "Have you hugged your coolth today?" or "It's more fun with the Sun!"

Let's face it. Solar energy has suffered from a lack of the dramatic. Who can wax poetic over a huge orange dwarf, a sun 864,000 miles in diameter, weighing 330,000 times as much as the earth? Whose heart can beat with passion at the thought of that big nuclear reactor in the sky, conveniently placed 93 million miles away, out of even the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency? What public spirited person, with his heart and his temperature controls set at the right place, can expound with excitement over a solar hot water heater?

But instead of promotion, the subject has been bombarded with platitudes. Everybody knows there's nothing new under the sun, and that "that lucky old sun got nothing to do but roll around heaven all day." Now moonlight is another matter. Poets and lyricists have elevated the moon to magic while the sun is struck with this smiley faced image. The moon is romance and moist phrases. The sun? That's "gosh" and "You're looking swell."

Energy specialists have looked at the sun differently, of course. To them, those long dusty beams, those dancing specks that children try to catch in cupped hands, aren't beams at all. They are individual packets of energy or photons sent from that massive powerhouse in the sky. The trick of science is to grab those packets of energy and use them to the best advantage.

Anyone who has basked outdoors on an Arizona afternoon in June can testify those packets pack a wallop. You can go from rare to well done in an hour on a hot day. It's commonly known that the state receives enough solar energy in a month and a half to power it for a century. That's 4000 hours of sunshine a year, a record only matched by the Sahara Desert and the high plateaus of Peru and we're more conveniently located than either of those.

So what's the problem? All that sunshine is free, isn't t? We've walked on the moon. Why not skip to the sun? One utility company executive said testily, "Sure, we've walked on the moon but we aren't selling tickets yet." And another expert added, "The sunshine is free. But all that equipment to put it to work, now that's expensive."

Basically, one problem is that the sun shines on its own schedule, leaving us to figure out how to store the energy for the hours we need it. Many people put their trust in research dollars to solve all problems, but money, alone, isn't the answer. Remember the words of Dixie Lee Ray, nuclear expert and political figure, who remarked, "The gestation period for a human child is nine months with the female of the species, and no matter how hard they may try, nine women cannot produce a baby in one month."

So if dollars cannot do it all, what can? Don Osborn, of the state's Solar Energy Commission, replied without hesitation. "We need more intensity," he said, lapsing into sun-speak. "We need more money and more time and more effort. With such a supposedly strong solar commitment, we still have committed very little resources in absolute terms. We've just lined up; we're not even into the race."

Picture it: fifty states milling around before a charity marathon. Noses are slathered with zinc oxide, numbers fixed firmly onto T-shirts, and all those

Solar Living

The Eigenbrode and Busby homes in Flagstaff feature solar passive designs. Winner of HUD's first passive solar home award, the Eigenbrode home has an attached solar greenhouse and an ultra-thick concrete and glass "Trombe" wall for space heating. Photos by Peter Bloomer