The following interview was originally broadcast on August 20, 2014, when this website was called the ECOreport and all of my long distance interviews were over Skype.

Solar technology was invented in the United States and the world’s first solar company was American. The initial race to develop wind energy was closer, but once again the first prototype was built in the U.S.  

In 1978 Dr Alan Hoffman handed President Jimmy Carter a plan to fast track the adoption of renewable energy.

Only Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 and for the next three decades, Hoffman watched as other nations took over the leadership in developing renewables.

CC:  26 years before Japan and Germany became leaders in solar technology, America was at a crossroad and you presented President Carter with a plan that could have put us decades ahead of where we are right now. 

AH: “Well, that’s exactly the reaction that my  wife had when she kindly retyped the executive summary. It turns out that the original copy of the DPR was typed on a different software platform, and I couldn’t copy it into a document I was preparing. So I asked her to retype  the executive summary, and she did, and she read it while she was typing it, and she reacted extremely strongly.  She said, ‘Why have we failed to follow up on a 1978 report?” 

“There’s no simple answer to that.”

“She did encourage me to write about it, and as she put it, name names. She felt that was pretty safe for me to do since I have now retired from my long career at the US Department of Energy (DOE).”

“That’s one of the things I’ve been doing in my blog.  I’ve been writing on a lot of stuff and,  telling it like  I see it. It’s a little bit more difficult when you’re working in an administration because at that point you either  go along with the policy or you quit.” 

“I was 75 when I retired and I took her up at her suggestion to write about it. It just came pouring out of me. Most people today, especially the young people I’ve worked with recently,  don’t know anything about the DPR and what we did in 1978.  So I see it as a useful piece of history to share with particularly the young people.”

“There are some people running around who remember it well, but that’s a limited number and I wanted to get it out there. In fact, sharing some of that history is one of the primary purposes of me doing my blog, not only to comment on energy technologies and water energy technologies, which I’ve also done a lot of work on.”

“But just to share some history with people who don’t have access to that kind of information.  One of my pet peeves nowadays is the fact that we don’t take the time to talk to young people about history and do enough mentoring with them to get them ready for their responsibilities.  A lot has taken place in the past and that may or may not be stuff that young people want to keep going on, but at least they should know what we did in the older days.”

“So that’s the history of that. It’s gotten quite a reaction.  I think I mentioned to you  in our earlier emails that it was first published in Energy post.eu by Karel Beckman, and then it went to Clean Technica, which you’re very familiar with*, and several other e-journals that reproduced it. The Facebook discussion is well over a hundred comments at this point, so it’s obviously touching a source of interest. It’s a very important discussion, I think, for our country and actually the world to have.” 

CC: How far would America be ahead in the adoption of renewables if it had followed your report’s recommendations? 

AH: “Our report actually said  if the right decisions were made and there was enough political will, we could do 20% of our national electricity from renewable energy by 2000.”

“You have to remember in 1978 ,when this report was drafted, oil prices were on an upward trajectory. They were projected in the year 2000 to go much higher. In fact,  one of the big discussions I always had with my boss was how high that price was going to go.  We all agreed that the trajectory was positive. Was it going to go to $50 a barrel or $100 a barrel by 2000? We weren’t sure, but we knew it was going up.”  

“Then of course, what happened is that in the mid 80s, oil prices dropped dramatically – even below $10 a barrel at one point.  People just stopped worrying about it,  in large part, except for some of us who were concerned.”

“I was carpooling with a neighbor.  Every time we passed a gas station, I said, ‘Oh well you’ve got to  increase the price of energy so people will treat it more carefully.’ He just didn’t want to pay more at the pump and that was a typical attitude, and it still is.”

“The hard thing for some of the leadership back in 1978, I mean  for the Secretary of Energy,  was signing off on a report that said we could do up to 20% by 2000.”

 CC: How much of that 20% is solar? 

AH: “That included hydro,  biomass,  some wind, but solar could have been 10% easily by the year 2000, but it really does take political will.  All of this is technically feasible, there’s no question about that, but there are a lot of things that are technically feasible that are not practical because of cost or other considerations. Solar was expensive in those days, and it was very important to get the costs down and we’re finally beginning to do it. But now  it’s 40 years later. Yeah, it could have been done.”  

CC: Did it say $1.5 billion was spent on research and development between 74 and 79? 

AH: “Yep.” 

CC: For that particular report, you had 175 senior government officials, which makes me wonder how many people were actually involved – which is a lot of work. And the report itself took six months to write up.

AH: “I joined DOE as a political appointee on April 3rd, 1970. I had been on the Hill. My background is a traditional physicist,  academic industrial research,  teaching, and I came down to Washington for a year in 1974 as a congressional fellow to work on the Hill. Program was in its second year at that time and all of this was very new for the scientific community.   I stayed on as staff scientist for the Senate Commerce Committee, which became the Commerce Science and Transportation Committee. We absorbed the space program when Carter was elected.”

 “I was asked to join the new administration as a political appointee, and I agreed to do so as long as they let me work on renewable energy in the New Department of Energy, which had just formed  a month after I joined. Carter went out to Golden, Colorado, to dedicate SERI, this brand new Solar Energy Research Institute, and he announced this study.

“My boss called me into his office, said, the President has just announced this major study and guess who’s going to run it? That’s how I was appointed head of this new study. It was going to involve 30 agencies including DOE  and people were going to be assigned to the task force. At its peak, not on average, but at its peak, there are 175 senior people working on this study.  It was fast for  an executive branch study, for  any government study. It was done quite quickly. It’s probably the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life,  managing all those departments and agencies to come up with something that everybody could agree with. But we worked hard and it’s an experience that was very unique in our professional lives.”

CC: The solar panels on the White House is somewhat of a symbol. How does that tie into all of this? 

AH: “That was a decision by the White House. We did not recommend  doing solar hot water panels or solar cell panels. Somebody on the domestic policy staff came up with that suggestion. When the dedication took place in April of 1979, I was not invited and neither were any of my staff invited to the dedication ceremony on the White House grounds. But Carter’s speech that day was largely based on the DPR, which we had delivered  to the White House on December 6th, 1978. There is a video of that speech, which I have a copy of now, and it was strictly a White House decision.”

“I’m really not sure how they decided on the solar hot water panels. That was an early time in the history of solar hot water heating. The units that were installed certainly worked, but they developed leaks and eventually they were removed by the Reagan administration as a symbol of their resistance to renewable energy, but it could have been a lot worse.”

“Of course, they tried to get rid of the whole Department of Energy and significantly reduced  the budget to literally one eighth of what it had been at the peak of the Carter years.” 

CC: Why was Reagan opposed to it so much?

AH: “I can only speculate.  I think there was just a psychological resistance to threatening the traditional energy industries. He was certainly subjected to a lot of lobbying by traditional energy industries and his staff  were also  exposed but nothing unique.”

“It was very hard to convince people that we needed renewable energy at that time because energy was relatively cheap in the United States. We’d gone through this low-cost oil period in the mid 80s,  it just wasn’t high on people’s agendas.” 

“There was a lot of uncertainty about renewables, part of it fueled by the coal industry which seriously attacked my programs in the mid 90s claiming that ‘sure, renewables  are cute, but  they can’t supply the kind of energy that the country needs.’  We spend a lot of time trying to refute those inaccurate reports. They would hire supposedly neutral people to issue these reports, which were a lot of bull. It took a lot of our time and it’s something  I still hold against the coal industry, but they were feeling very threatened as renewables began to emerge  in the early to mid 90s.” 

“People were beginning to pay a little bit more attention, both, during the George Bush Senior administration and then in the Clinton/Gore administration. Coal began to feel very threatened. They were the major source of domestic electricity, and it was clear that renewable electricity would cut into their market share. That’s what people do when their vested interests are being threatened. It was  a very interesting, a difficult period.”

“Budgets were still low, relatively speaking in terms of the opportunity, but they began to increase slightly under George Bush 41 and increased somewhat further under Clinton and Gore.” 

CC: George Bush 41 is a reference to George Bush, senior being the 41st President. 

AH: “He was fairly decent about renewables. George Sr. George Bush 41 did designate SERI as a national laboratory. That was a big step, and that became the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is today the leading national laboratory on renewable energy in the world. With Clinton and Gore, things did improve somewhat in terms of budget until we ran into the Gingrich Revolution, when the Republicans took over the House and Senate.  They cut my budget by 25%, maybe even 30%, that translated into major cuts in what I could provide to NREL.” 

CC: NREL is short for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 

AH: “They were getting at least 60% of their budget from my budget and they had to lay off one quarter of their staff. They laid off 200 people, which seriously impacted the renewable program, as well as disrupted many people’s professional lives It was a very difficult period and the person at NREL who had to,  coordinate those layoffs was very devastated by the need to do so.” 

“Under Bush and Cheney, there was really a focus on fossil fuel, energy, and nuclear energy, relatively little focus on renewables. They didn’t destroy the renewable budget and completely. But one of the things that did happen is that George Bush 43, now the, the junior decided that hydrogen was going to be a major focus of his program.  He included mention of hydrogen in one of his State of the Union addresses early in his presidency. While I am sort of in favor of hydrogen in the long term, what happened is that because of the President’s referral to hydrogen in that State of the Union address, the budget for hydrogen suddenly jumped significantly at the expense of renewables. I don’t think the Bush administration really either understood or appreciated the role of renewables in the long term future of the American energy they were very focused on fossil fuels and nuclear, and their policies reflected that.”

“In fact, I was told a story, which I cannot confirm, but I was told by somebody who supposedly was at the White House when Bush was meeting with the Philippine Minister of Energy, who was talking about all the solar stuff they were doing, and Bush said, ‘Why are you doing that? Because it’s not reliable.’ that’s apocryphal as far as I’m concerned because I can’t confirm the story. But it sounds like something that George Bush 43 might have said. It certainly was clear from the policies  that was renewable energy was not a priority of that administration. I suspect that energy policy was largely in the hands of Dick Cheney, who was clearly focused on other industries.”  

CC: In 2004, Japan became number one in the world in solar and Germany launched the first feed and tariff, I believe. What did that  mean to someone who’s been working on renewables for  more than a quarter of a century?

AH: “Well, you just defined a source of frustration.”

“It also points up something that I feel very strongly, national energy policy is critical to what we do in the energy field.  I have been pushing for a long time to get a national energy policy that clearly identifies energy efficiency as the cornerstone of national energy policy, and that provides long-term policy support for development and deployment of renewable energy.”

“I think that clean energy future is inevitable that a large part of our future energy generation will be via renewable means, and we have to get on that path to that future as quickly as possible. My anger with the Clinton Gore administration is they didn’t do enough to put us on that path more than 20 years ago.”

“I was ready to retire when Obama was elected, but I decided not to because we finally had a president who seemed to really understand the need for renewable energy and the need to move onto that path as quickly as possible. So I stayed another four years, but I finally decided that I could be more effective outside the department and inside the department because of all kinds of bureaucratic slowness.”

“Yeah, I was very frustrated to see other countries not only moving ahead in the development and deployment of these technologies, but also because  the jobs that would’ve gone with that were going elsewhere.  Not to the United States, which really pioneered on most of these technologies, particularly solar.”

 “The solar cell was invented at Bell Laboratories in the 1950s, and yet Germany today is the leading country for a deployment of PV in the world, photovoltaics and it’s all because of their feed in tariff policy. The policy is central and this congress has been very resistant to passing a comprehensive and long future looking energy policy.”

“I am very upset about that.  I keep arguing that we need a policy and I would even go as far as to say we need a carbon tax to really address climate change  and encourage the innovation that will lead us more quickly to our renewable energy future.” 

CC: Can you see the situation with Congress changing and us making some headway? 

AH: “Not in the near future, but I see important reasons why it should happen.”

“We’ve got to get ser more serious than we are about climate change. It is not only a real phenomenon, but a very threatening phenomenon. There are still people in Congress who deny its existence, which is just uninformed and ignorant. It is a problem that we just have to address. It’s not going to be fixed tomorrow, but we have to get started.” 

“I really think that a long-term carbon tax steadily increasing, predictable into the future  is important for the private sector.  They may or may not like that kind of a policy, but at least they know what they’re dealing with.” 

“I have actually worked with a number of private sector people in the fossil fuel and nuclear industries who say, ‘okay,  just tell us what the policy is gonna be. We can make our own decisions on what’s in our self-interest.’  I think that’s absolutely true.  If you tell ’em what’s gonna be, they can optimize their operations and their investments to take that into account. In addition, a carbon tax, in my opinion, will create a lot of jobs through the innovation and deployment of clean energy technologies.”

“The future of energy, and the revenues that would come in from that carbon tax, could be used for a whole bunch of things. For example, to reduce other tax rates on industry and even individuals to some extent.  The revenues could be used to address inequities in our tax system for poor people who get hit particularly hard by taxes on fuel use.” 

“The other reason I think it’s an important possibility to consider is that it’s an area in which Democrats and Republicans in the US can get together  and agree because  there seems to be general agreement that we need to do something about our tax laws and we need to implement tax reform. This is one way of looking at it to reduce tax rates and serve some useful purposes.” 

“I’m a strong advocate of a carbon tax.”

“I know the word tax is negative for some people, but  we pay taxes in all kinds of ways in our economy.”

“We’ve got to get over that  hang-up about the word tax. Call it what you will, but we need to innovate and we need to address carbon contamination of our atmosphere and global warming.” 

CC: Back in 1978, you thought it might have been possible to get 10% of our energy from solar by 2000.

AH: “We would have agreed with that number.”  

CC: Now solar modules are more sophisticated. We’re developing battery storage systems. There are some systems in operation already and others are planned. We’ve got software that makes it more predictable where you need the solar, how much you can get. How far do you think we can go? 

AH: “I’ve actually put myself on the line recently.  It’s a guesstimate. One of my blog posts is entitled, looking ahead 30 to 40 years, a risky business.  Just to quote table at the end of the piece. And this all can be found by the way, on my blog site, www.lapsedphysicist.org. I say in 2050, it would not surprise me if us generating capacity was divided as follows.” 

“I said nuclear five to 10%. Coal, zero to 5%. I see coal disappearing as a generating source. Oil we don’t really use for generation, so it would be zero, but natural gas with the fracking revolution taking place, and I think fracking is with us for awhile ,  I see it from 30 to 40%. Solar , wind and hydro, the major forms of renewable energy today, 50 to 60%. So I’m very optimistic about where we’re gonna be in 2050 in terms of renewables and then other renewables, which would include geothermal and ocean and wave and tidal energy I have put down as five to 10%.” 

 “I basically see over the next 40 years,  a transition from our heavy dependence on coal for generation to a renewable based electricity system.”

“Of course, this is entirely separate from what’s gonna happen in the transportation field where alternate liquid fuels may be developed and electrification will take place in many places, particularly cars and and trucks.  That’ll be a major source of growth in electricity in the United States, and hopefully most of it will be supplied by renewable electricity.”

“I’m willing to stick my neck out. Of course, 40 years from now, I won’t be alive to receive  the slings and arrows or kudos for what I’m projecting. But, I’m quite optimistic that the future will take a strong move in the direction of renewable energy.” 

This interview was originally broadcast 9 years ago, in August 2014. 

As of 2022, a little more than two decades after what might have been possible had it implimented the DPR, the United States was obtaining 20% of its electricity from renewables. 

*Roy L Hales was a senior staff reporter at Clean Technica 2014-2016 (and continued posting periodically until shortly after Cortes Currents was launched in 2019), as well as editor/owner of the ECOreport.

Image at top of page:  President Jimmy Carter at his desk in the Oval Office – courtesy Children’s Bureau photostream via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)

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