Page 4 RAIN __November 1980 . From the Outside in:· B.uilding the Solar Coalition, / /y Tom lltqtfM • Western Sun, the we;tern states Regional Solar.Energy Complex , held its first "whole staff" fprum this September. Consistent with Western Sun's (very posh) image, the forum was a first class affair. Tab for the day ran somewhere between $22,000 and· $45,000 (RAIN' s total expenses for 1979 amounted to $45,307). Attending as the·press, we feasted on crab atzd prime rib, served on J.P. Stevens (as in "support the Stevens-8dycott") tablecloths, an·d listened to David Morris (Institute for Local Self-Reliance), Fran Koster (Franklin County Energy Plcmand TVA's Solar Application Branch), Bruce Anderson (Solar Lobby and Solar Age Magazine) and several others. IYenis Hayes, director of the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), and Don Aitkin, director of Westkrn Sun, spoke in the morning; by lunchtime half of Western Sun's "whole staff" :had deserted us. They could have invited the local solar community Jo their forum and at least had an audience. They could have opened it to the public, charged admission, cmd made money on it. I was left with the question: "Just who's trying to impress whom?" . . • None-the-less, the forum was strong on strategy, and we've been given access to tapes of the key sessions. This, Tom Hayden's opening address, seemed a good summary of the new agenda facing the solar community. W~ found it i71.teresting to compare to our earlier interview with Karl Hess. In the next few months we'll be publishing se·veral of the other forum talks, each focussing · on ways to coalesce, finance, and,maintain a renewable energy future. -CC • ' • We are meeting today as the represent~tives of 13 Western governors, and as the staff of Western SUN, to e?{amine the progress being made towards the solar fu~ure,·and the obstacles stiUin ot1r way. . Let me describe the dilemma I see and frustration I feel, then suggest some possible ways out. • ,, My own perspective can be illustrated besdt:om our solar experience in California. In the past several years, we have made strides . that no one would have believed possible in the beginning. We have an excellent tax credit, which has just been ~enewed by the Legislature./We have a new program of loans to small solar entrepreneurs, • designed to begin in 1981. We have a program of "no cost" loans to solar.consumers by c;iur uti,lities, schep.uled to begin implementation this month. There is a law protecting small businesses from utility •dpmination of t_he solar market. Several millions of dollars have gone into retrofitting st~te bu'Hdings. The Legislature has approved a study aimed at maximum feasible solarizing of California in the· '·80s. 1To promote solar initiatives, we have the Governor's SolarCal Council, a citizens commission whose 1979 Action Plan, Towards a Solar California, was called the "most outstanding solar energy program" encountered by tlie editors of the Harvard report Energy Future.. There is also the SolarCal Commis~ion on Local Govern- • ment and Renewable Resm:Hces, a_rtetwork of more than 50 elected officials who are passing pioneering s~lar ordinances in Davis, San Diego, Santa·Clara and many other California cities'and counties. We-even have a solar foreign policy, symbolized by the joint effortbetween California and Israel to generate electricity from a "solar . pond" at the Salton Sea. It is fair·to say that Califor~ia leads the na- •tion in solar energy. . . • And yet such a claim makes me uneasy. Our progress is ambiguous when analyzed next to the re~l problems and potenti~ls we • face. Solar applicatio~s have approximately doubled i!i California in the past,four years, it is true, but the current count"is only 60,000 in1a state with a housing stock of over six million units (and 29,000 of the soliir devices are for swimming pools). This is within-a state whose solar potential is so bright that a Lawrence Livermore study in 1975 concluded that California could operat~ self-sufficiently on renewable, decentralized enrrgy systems by the year 2020 even if our population doubles and economic activity triples. In ·co~trast, a 1.979 memo by state energy commissioner Emilio Varanini suggests that a conventional energy future might require California to site 10-15 nuclear or coal plants, spend over $75 billion, increase our water requirements for cooling by thirtyfold, abandon 20,0QO acres of agricultural land, suffer much.greater air pollution, and establish hundreds of disposal sites near watersheds, · fault lines and populated areas. Not a scenario anyone wants, but a scenario which will be dictated by our energy onsumption patterns unless we create an alternative in the immediate future.
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