Page 8 RAIN June 1978 Regulate Bureaucracies, Not the Sun -William A. Shurcliff It seems to me that the men who are writing government standards on solar heating equipment have been cencentrating on the wrong thing. Most of the standards they draw up dea\ with durability and efficiency instead of with cost-effectiveness. I remember the old golfing joke: Smith says: "Your ball went into the pond; why are you looking for it on the fairway?" Jone~ replies: "I am trying to be practical. Searching the pond is difficult and messy. But searching the fairway is fast and straightforward." . What the potential buyer of solar-heating equ~pment really wants is equipment th'at is cost-effective. He wants to know which system, over a 20-year period, will deliver the most heat at the smallest overall cost. Do the standards writers prepare standards on this? In comparing the various makes of equipment, do they list values of "BTUs per buck"? • They do not. • Why not? If asked, they would reply, I believe, along these lines: "The subj~ct is too difficult and messy. No one can predict t~e number of ,BTUs delivered, because it ·depends on so many factors, such as.site, climate, what_typ~ and size· of storage system is used, and how the r~sidents operate the system. All of these factors are outside our control. Cost, also, is difficult and messy; suppliers keep changing their prices; installation costs are hard to predict; maintenance costs are unknown." • Then why don't the standards writers give up? If they can't answer the crucial question, why don't they remain silent (or stick to issues of safety, which everyone knows to be important)? Here their reply might take this form: "We are trying to do our best. Trying to be helpful. So we write standards on collection efficiency and durability. We think it will be helpful to buyers to know which equipment has high collection efficiency and high durability." But here the tragedy of standards reaches its-climax. The fact is that the most efficient and mosf durable equipment . may o~ may not be the most cos't-effective. Cpnceivably it may be the least cost-effective-the worst buy. A Rolls Royce may be the most efficient and durable automobile; but its costeffectiveness is far below that of a Toyota. A $15 pen may perform superbly; but it is.less cost-effective than a typical 50¢ pen. To me i~ is frightening to see a government agency (for example, the agency recently set up by the State ,of California) set up standards on efficiency and durability, and give the public vast amounts of information on these topics, de~pite the fact that the correlation between these topics and costeffectiveness is dubious and may even be negative. Is such ·information really helpful? Or does it distract people from what is truly important: cost-effectiveness? , Ancj won't manufacturers, too, be distracted?' Will they not be tempted to modify their designs so as to increase efficiency and durability even at the risk of decreasing cost-effectiveness? This is what I really fear. Because the crucial (and often miss- . ing) prerequisite to a healthy solar heating industry is costeffectiveness. Bill Shurcliff says it well-how much of our government activity is looking for golf balls where it is easy to look for them instead ofwhere we know they are? - TB Why is there the intense, concentrated concern that John Q. Public shall not suffer any disappointment when he buys solar heating equipment? By way of contrast, consider the following: If he buys a second-hand car, and it turns out very badly, he has little or no recourse. If he buys cigarettes, and gets cancer of the lung (as 100,000 persons do each year), he has no recourse. . If he buys alcoholic beverages and becomes an alcoholic (as 1,000,000 persons do each year), he has no recourse. Why, then, this tremendous concern that he might be wasting, say, $2,000? Is this as hard on him as buying a very defective $4,000 car? Or as contracting cancer of the lungs? Or as becoming an alcoholic? Considering cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, boats, swimming pools, snowmobiles, etc., do not our citizens waste on the order of $10 to $100 billion·each year? Is the Government really in the business of trying to stop people from wasting money? To impose standards on life-and-death materials like .vaccines is essential. But on solar heating systems, NO.
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