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“Turn on the Sunshine”: a History of the Solar Future Christopher E. Johnson a Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillmen “Turn on the Sunshine”: A History of the Solar Future Christopher E. Johnson A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2015 Reading Committee: Linda L. Nash, Chair James N. Gregory Bruce Hevly Program Authorized to Offer Degree: History © 2015 Christopher E. Johnson University of Washington Abstract “‘Turn on the Sunshine’: A History of the Solar Future” Christopher E. Johnson Chair of the supervisory committee: Professor Linda L. Nash History This dissertation examines the history of solar energy technology alongside broad changes in the politics and geography of energy since the nineteenth century. I argue that solar technologies evolved as expressions of the anxieties of the fossil fuel age which, while never widely adopted, informed a persistent cultural interest in alternative energy futures that shaped larger developments in energy politics. I link the evolution of common types of solar technologies and ideas about their potential to four additional contexts: late nineteenth and early twentieth century imperial expansion, the advent of the Cold War, the convergence of environmentalism and the energy crisis in the 1970s, and the more recent emergence of sustainability as a framework for global energy and environmental politics. In each of these contexts, solar technologies developed as instruments of politics as well as forms of politics in their own right, reflecting and contributing to new conceptions of the limitations of fossil fuel dependence and the promise of alternatives. I also address the geographic dimensions of solar politics in each of these periods. My focus on California primarily, but also Arizona, North Africa, and – in the chapter on photovoltaic cells – outer space, reflects the importance of these places as nexuses in the development and global travel of solar technologies. Linked as peripheries of an expansionist iii fossil fuel society, they became sites of experimentation in new ways of deriving energy from nature and organizing society around energy. Overall, this study reveals a higher incidence of geographic variance, contestation, and uncertainty in energy technology politics during the fossil fuel age than historians typically acknowledge. It also complicates common assumptions about the origins and potentialities of existing solar technologies, drawing attention to their early associations with the politics of empire and the Cold War prior to their reformulation in the 1970s as tools promoting countercultural and environmentalist visions of the future. By situating solar technology development in time and place, this study seeks to historicize meanings commonly attached to solar and, in doing so, provide a historical basis for evaluating present debates over energy alternatives. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….………vi Introduction: A Perpetually New Technology…………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter 1: “A Place in the Sun”: The Colonial Origins of Solar Technology……………………...……….22 Chapter 2: Solar Energy and the California Dream………………………………………………………….58 Chapter 3: Energy Anxieties in an Age of Abundance………………………………………………………88 Chapter 4: A Spin-off Technology: Semiconductors, Solar Cells, and the Race for Space………………..134 Chapter 5: Solar Revival: The 1973 Oil Crisis and the Reimagining of a Solar Future……………………178 Chapter 6: Beyond the Limits of Federal Reform: Toward a Solar Future in California…………………..231 Conclusion: Solar Energy and Sustainability: A Question of Scale…………..……………….……....…….286 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………312 v Acknowledgements I owe a debt of gratitude to all who helped me realize this dissertation. I am especially thankful for the opportunity to work with Linda Nash as my primary advisor at the University of Washington. Her patience, encouragement, and good advice carried me through the project. Jim Gregory and Bruce Hevly also offered invaluable guidance throughout the preparation and writing stages. I also extend thanks to Tiago Saraiva, Augustine Sedgewick, and Mihir Pandaya who read portions of early drafts and offered helpful comments. Even in an age of digitized information, those who preserve, catalog, and make available the physical records of the past continue to provide essential services to historians. I am grateful for the staff members of the California State Archives and the Arizona State University Library in particular who guided me to a number of sources which proved critical to piecing together the more obscure aspects of the solar technology story. Special thanks goes to James R. Allen II at the Arizona State University Architecture and Environmental Design Library, Polly Armstrong at the Stanford University Special Collections, and John Skarstad and Daryl Morrison at the University of California, Davis Special Collections. I was extremely fortunate to have the support of the National Park Service Pacific West Regional Office in Seattle where I was employed as a project historian during the writing of this dissertation. My supervisors Dave Louter and Elaine Jackson-Retondo graciously offered encouragement as well as flexibility in my work schedule which enabled me to push through the difficult stretches in the research and writing process. I am also thankful for the support, advice, and good company of my coworkers over the past five years. vi Finally, I am most appreciative of my family including my mother, father, and sister who never doubted that I would finish this project. My deepest gratitude is reserved for my wife Tomoko for her love, patience, and unending support. I am also thankful for my sons, Sai and Hiro, both of whom were born during the course of this project. While they often competed with the dissertation for my time and focus, they were always there to lift my spirits, make me laugh, and inspire me to forge ahead. This dissertation is for them. vii Introduction A Perpetually New Technology To promote the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the New York Times asked science fiction author Isaac Asimov to offer his vision of technology fifty years in the future. By 2014, he wrote, machines would perform nearly all the labor in the workplace and the home. Freed from toil, people would enjoy a life of leisure, traveling from place to place in hover cars and on moving sidewalks. Asimov also predicted that people would “continue to withdraw from nature to create an environment that will suit them better.” Houses would be built underground. Instead of windows, residences would be outfitted with luminescent walls that glowed with soft light in various hues. To feed a growing population and provide for more residential space, farms would be replaced by facilities for synthesizing food from yeast and algae. While people would have less direct contact with familiar, tangible forms of nature, this separation would be made possible by their ability to tap into unseen processes occurring at the quantum level. Energy would be the foundation for this smoothly mechanized world. Most day-to-day gadgets would be wireless, running off radioisotopes, the by-products of the nuclear fission reactors which by then would be supplying half of the world’s power needs. A few experimental fusion reactors would also be in operation. The remainder of the world’s energy would come from sunlight collected at sprawling power stations “in a number of desert and semi-desert areas – Arizona, Negev, and Kazakhstan.” In addition to fusion research, scientists would be working on “models of power stations in space, collecting sunlight by means of huge parabolic focusing devices and radiating the energy thus collected down to earth.”1 1 Isaac Asimov, “Visit to the World’s Fair of 2014,” New York Times, August 16, 1964. 1 Asimov’s vision of a technological utopia powered by a combination of nuclear and solar energy presents a contrast to images usually associated with solar technology. At the time, solar had not yet acquired the reputation as a “subject for eco-freaks” it would carry a decade later.2 Nor did Asimov’s future reflect the later countercultural conception of solar as “intrinsically democratic” and nuclear energy as the epitome of impersonal, authoritarian technology.3 His vision of space-based solar farms and portable radioisotopes actually suggest how, in another context, the reverse could also be true. For Asimov, technologies to convert direct sunlight to useable energy would contribute to maintaining technological progress and material abundance beyond the end of the age of fossil fuels. They were devices for perpetuating the energy intensive, technocratic society that many later solar advocates sought to challenge. Prescience or lack thereof aside, what is most surprising about Asimov’s vision is that it was commonplace. His “gadgety world of the future” borrowed heavily from a strain of futurist thinking that pervaded American popular culture in the 1950s and early 1960s.4 Asimov’s conception of solar technology also drew on existing models. Proposals for powering a future society with energy generated from solar collectors covering the desert regions of the world dated to the late nineteenth century. The notion of beaming energy to earth from orbital solar collectors was more recent, appearing initially in science fiction before becoming a focus of government and industry collaboration in the context of the Cold War race for global 2 The “Eco-freaks” quote is from New York Times Magazine, March 16, 1975. Quoted in Daniel Yergin,
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