Jimmy Carter’s legacy in Colorado is solar panels and NREL

Jimmy Carter played an underappreciated role in Colorado history. It all started in May 1978 when he announced that the Golden Solar Energy Research Institute would receive $100 million in federal funding.

“No one can ban sunlight,” Carter said. “No cartel controls the sun. His energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters. It is free from stench and smog. Solar energy only needs to be collected, stored and used.

It was an exceptional day in Golden. Carter’s timing for his “day of sunshine” was not the right time. But he was specific about solar power in a way we haven’t yet fully appreciated.

Carter had done graduate work in nuclear energy, but in 1975 he was thinking about renewable energy. He invited Ron Larson, a professor of electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, to share lunch and talk about renewable energy.

“At that time, there wasn’t much photovoltaics yet,” Larson told me recently. “It was over $100 a watt. Today, it’s less than $1 per watt.

Larson moved to Colorado in 1977 to work as SERI’s first senior scientist and remained there. In several roles, he has contributed to changing our energy consumption. Since then, thousands of people have followed.

Part of SERI’s mission – to advance the use of solar energy – was to reach out to 300 Colorado builders and architects to help them learn how to build homes with less need for fossil fuels.

John Avenson, an engineer at AT&T/Bell Labs, was among the beneficiaries. The Westminster house he built in 1981 faces south and has large windows coupled with efficient blinds.

On Facebook the day after Carter’s death, Avenson lamented the widespread failure to recognize Carter’s early thoughts: “Every house built since then should have been as good or better, but the program was canceled by (the President Ronald) Reagan. »

Avenson’s home, near Standley Lake Reservoir, was built with a natural gas boiler. He rarely used it, his gas bills never exceeding $180 for a full year. After some adjustments and new technology, he was finally convinced the house would work fine at -20 degrees without a furnace. In 2016, he asked Xcel Energy to cut the gas line.

When I visited him on New Year’s Eve, he was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. “I’m an Arizona kind of person,” he said. It keeps the house between 72 and 78 degrees. It will air January 25 on PBS.

I asked Avenson about Carter’s death. “Oh, that’s so sad,” he replied. “He influenced my life without knowing it.”

Steve Andrews was also influenced by Carter. A veteran of the Vietnam War, he had used the GI Bill of Rights to take basic college courses in engineering. This led me to an internship and then a job at SERI. He wrote the guide for the annual Denver Home Builders Parade in 1981, showcasing about a dozen passive solar homes in the Denver metro area.

Then Andrews was fired. As president, Reagan didn’t really need renewable energy. In particular, he removed the 32 solar panels that Carter had placed atop the White House. He also cut SERI’s budget in half. Andrews, a recent recruit, was among the first to leave. SERI’s mission was also reduced, which relegated awareness-raising to the background. Andrews recalled that the director, Denis Hayes, was fired after accusing his bosses at the U.S. Department of Energy of being something along the lines of “dull gray men in dull gray suits thinking dull gray thoughts.”

Later, under the leadership of former oilman President George HW Bush, SERI was resurrected as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. NREL now has a staff of 3,675 employees and has expanded its influence.

Is it just a coincidence that Colorado adopted the nation’s first voter-initiated renewable energy portfolio standard in 2004? Or that Colorado has adopted a dozen or more new policies and regulations in recent years designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? We may be guilty of parochial pride, but there is no doubt that Colorado has a place in any national conversation about the pivot to a new energy economy, to borrow the center’s headline from former Gov. Bill Ritter, affiliate at Colorado State University.

Ironically, passive house construction has had little success. The economics are unassailable and the technology just isn’t that difficult. This requires basic site planning. Andrews, during his post-SERI career, once calculated that 85 percent of homes in the Denver metro area face east or west. This results in unwanted heat in summer, but little in winter, when it is desired. Housing must face north and south.

Colorado still has decades of work to do to decarbonize its buildings. We must remember what Jimmy Carter understood almost 50 years ago.

Allen Best publishes BigPivots.com, an online journal that tracks Colorado’s energy and water transitions driven by climate change.

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