IN 1979, Gary Heald was a 21 year-old production engineer with a dream: He wanted to move to a farm and get off the local utility grid. "Public Service of New Hampshire was building the Seabrook nuclear power plant on the coast, and the rates kept going up and up," he recalls. "I knew the electric costs were going to be outrageous, and I didn't want to be tied to them if I didn't have to."
Heald found a site in southern New Hampshire with a decent southern exposure, and designed and built his home to take maximum advantage of it. The south wall of his 24- by 30-foot house is almost entirely glass; sunlight passing through the glass heats air in a greenhouse-like room, and vents permit the heated air to circulate through the rest of the house. From early December through late March, when temperatures average about 20 degrees, Heald and his wife, Kim, build wood fires at night. On the roof, 300 watts worth of photovoltaic panels (plus another 100 watts on top of the barn) provide 90 percent of the electricity for the Healds' home and the lights their barn; the rest is produced by gasoline-powered standby generators. The house is plumbed for a solar-powered hot water system that will cut costs further by enabling his hot-water heater to start with warm water instead of cold. "It will save an awful lot of energy if I can put water in the [gas-powered water] heater at 90 degrees as opposed to the well temperature of 50 degrees," he explains. Heald's annual cost for gas-powered electricity is currently $50 to $60.
Heald is one of tens of thousands of people who, in the 1970s and early 1980s, embraced alternative energy sources. They did so for a combination of reasons: oil price shocks, the souring of nuclear power's promise, a back-to-the-land ethos carried over from the '60s, and a desire not to rely on big utility companies. Researchers explored wind, geothermal, biomass and solar technologies for use on a grand scale, but for individual homeowners, the technology of choice was solar. Of all the alternative energy sources, solar was the most accessible. "It seems like the common-sense thing to do," says Mark Hanson of Fincastle, Va., who has lived in solar-heated homes since the early 1980s. "You've got a free sun that comes up every day and puts out heat, so it makes sense to collect it."
But home-based solar power never spread much beyond do-it-yourselfers like Hanson and Heald. Solar power proved to be too balky for people who expected sun-generated heat and electricity to be as reliable and trouble-free as the utility-supplied variety. Although passive-solar heating systems like Hanson's and Heald's - in which a building is designed so it can be warmed by the sun-had centuries of success behind them, few people had the money or the inclination to build passive-solar homes from the ground up. Instead, most of the people who were caught up in the solar frenzy opted to add "active" heating systems to their existing homes. These systems, which rely on solar collectors to concentrate sunlight so that it heats water, were cumbersome, expensive, inefficient and tended to break down. Everyone else hoped that solar power would mean cheaper electricity bills when their local utilities harnessed the power of the sun's rays. That never happened, and when the energy crisis faded in the early '80s, so did most people's interest in solar energy,
Now, however, solar is poised for a comeback. Technologies that use sunlight to generate heat and electricity are cheaper, more reliable and more efficient than ever before. And all of the old reasons why people were attracted to solar still apply today: electricity is still expensive in many areas of the country; coal-fired power plants still pose a threat to miners' health and the environment; nuclear power has fallen into disfavor; and oil is no more renewable now than it was in the early '70s.
This has led to a new surge of interest in solar power - not just on the part of home tinkerers, but by some hard-headed, profit-minded corporations. This time, they're not just experimenting; they're sinking millions into power plants that they expect will produce energy as cheaply or even cheaper than any of the competing technologies. So whether you're interested in a home-based system or hoping your utility will see the light, this time you have a good chance of reaping some benefits from solar power.
THE HEYDAY OF SOLAR
People have been harnessing the sun's power for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks built houses that were oriented in such a way that they were warmed by sunlight in the winter and largely protected from the sun's rays in the summer. The Romans built on the Greeks' design and used glass to build the first solar greenhouses. Centuries later, in the 1930s and 1940s, several U.S. builders used the same principles to construct prefabricated homes that relied on the sun to warm them.
But as long as fossil fuels - especially home-heating oil and the coal and oil that powered most electricity plants - stayed cheap, solar energy remained more of a curiosity than anything else. The only place where photovoltaic technology was more efficient than other energy sources was in space; satellites have been solar-powered since the early days of the U.S. space program. Solar didn't really generate much interest back on Earth until the 1970s, when a series of oil price hikes and gasoline shortages stunned Americans, plunged the economy into a recession, and left the country at the mercy of expensive and unpredictable foreign oil.