to take longer and would be harder to make it widespread. We didn’t see the costs coming down or the technology developing fast enough.” With Reagan elected, it was also clear that the heady Carter objective of 20 percent solar by the end of the century was gone. Most other large companies came to the same conclusion.12
In 1986, in the face of a large oversupply of oil on the world market, oil prices plummeted from a high of $34 a barrel to as little as $10 a barrel. That completely knocked the economic legs out from under the nascent solar industry. Price, it turned out, mattered enormously, and solar, as it was then, just could not compete. A solar architect who had thought he was “battling” OPEC found instead that his business was on the ropes without the support—and expectation—of relatively high energy prices.
THE EPITAPH?
In 1986, the same year as the price collapse, the solar hot water system on the roof of the White House sprung a leak. Instead of being repaired, the system was dismantled. Its designer would later explain that White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan “felt that the equipment was just a joke, and he had it taken down.” The disassembled equipment was eventually shipped off as surplus government property to a college in Maine, which used it to produce hot water for its cafeteria. Eventually the system outlived its usefulness on campus. In 2006 it was dismantled again, and part of it was packed up and shipped to Atlanta where—as Carter had speculated at his rooftop press conference twenty-seven years earlier—it ended up a museum exhibit. And, where else, but in the Carter Presidential Library.
The “rays of hope” for solar power dimmed, at least in the United States, into a very faint glow. Or, as the New York Times put it, “The promise of renewable power has become a distant hope.” Companies went bankrupt or disappeared altogether. Activists and entrepreneurs moved on into other fields. The Economist described this once buoyant solar industry as “a commercial graveyard for ecologically minded dreamers.” Within the nascent renewables industry, the decades of the 1980s and 1990s were to be recalled as the Valley of Death—companies struggled just to stay alive.
By this time, Scott Sklar, the former aide to Senator Javits, was head of the Solar Energy Industries Association, and the solar industry’s chief lobbyist in Washington. He remembered all too well the mood in those times.
“We were really morose,” he said.13
JAPAN: STAYING ALIVE
The end of the “solar dream” in the United States would pretty much have seemed to mean the end of the road for renewables. If the United States, the global leader in technology and R&D, had more or less given up on renewables, who else would stick with it? The answer was Japan.
In the early 1970s, Kotaro Ikeguchi was a rising young official in MITI, Japan’s powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Assigned to a department dealing with energy and mining, he became alarmed that Japan had become dangerously overreliant on Middle East oil and was oblivious to the risks. The consequences of a cutoff of supply could be disastrous.
But Ikeguchi could not stir much interest. For Japan’s high-speed economic growth in the 1960s and early 1970s had been fueled by Middle Eastern oil, and there was little expectation that would change.
So as an outlet for his anxieties, Ikeguchi decided to write a novel that might wake up both officialdom and the public to Japan’s vulnerability. His imaginary crisis was a Middle Eastern war that resulted in a cutoff of imports. His hero? By coincidence, it was a spry, incisive, but very pragmatic MITI bureaucrat with an understanding of Japan’s precarious energy dependence. Since he was a working bureaucrat, he needed a pen name. He came up with “Taichi Sakaiya,” which means, loosely, “Big Man on the Roof of the World.”
But before he could find a publisher, reality intruded. His fiction became nonfiction. With the 1973 oil crisis, the Japanese suddenly feared that their whole edifice of economic growth might collapse. Ikeguchi decided it would be inappropriate to publish his novel while the Japanese people were suffering through a real energy shortage, and he put it into a drawer.
Like his fictional hero, Ikeguchi was drafted to help formulate Japan’s response to a real energy crisis. He was tapped to head Japan’s Sunshine Project, the all-out national initiative to find a way to reduce Japan’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil. He parceled out grants, hammered out