Overview
Dante LaRiccia
During the postwar period, American consumers enjoyed a high-energy lifestyle predicated on the consumption of cheap fossil fuels. But when the 1973-74 oil shocks caused gasoline and crude oil prices to quadruple, it raised widespread anxiety about the United States’ energy future. Would the nation return to its normal energy abundance? Or would it have to chart a different path to a radically new energy future?
While some U.S. officials called for greater investment in domestic fossil fuel production, other politicians, scientists, and environmental activists emphasized lowering energy consumption, increasing energy efficiency, and expanding the use of renewable energy. For many, solar power represented one of the most promising forms of alternative energy. Part of what energy theorist Amory Lovins called “soft energy paths,” in contrast to capital-intensive and centralized “hard” energy sources, solar technologies promised renewable energy that could be produced and utilized at residential scales. In addition, Lovins argued, energy gains from solar energy and from energy efficiency would be more democratic, as well as less polluting.
Federal support for renewables and solar energy increased significantly after Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976. The federal government funded programs in solar energy research and education, such as those spearheaded by Denis Hayes, a lead organizer of Earth Day in 1970 and the director of a new Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado. The 1978 Energy Tax Act also provided tax credits for residences with solar energy systems, prompting homeowners, landlords, and community organizations to experiment with domestic applications of solar energy technology. The 1978 Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) also sought to encourage the development of non-utility power producers, including renewable energy generation.
The Carter administration took other symbolic actions to promote solar energy. In 1978, President Carter declared a national “Sun Day” to celebrate solar technologies. The Carter Administration also had 32 solar panels installed on the White House in June 1979 to heat hot water for the building. “By the end of this century,” Carter declared at the 1979 installation ceremony, “I want our nation to derive 20 percent of all energy we use from the sun.” He said that the White House solar hot water heater could “either be a curiosity, a museum piece … or one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”
Despite these grand aspirations, solar energy in the 1970s also had critical limitations. Many solar technologies remained highly experimental, small scale, and unconventional in their design. They generally were not cost competitive with other sources of energy, including most fossil fuels. The latter enjoyed lenient environmental laws that allowed fossil fuel users to pollute the air and water with relatively little cost, further accentuating solar energy’s cost disadvantages.
Ronald Reagan broke sharply with Jimmy Carter over energy policy. He considered solar energy a fanciful and unpromising technology. Reagan rejected Carter’s message to the American people about energy scarcity and conservation. Where Carter asked Americans to make do with less by “living thriftily,” Reagan promised a future of energy abundance supplied by fossil fuels. After Reagan’s election in 1980, the new administration emphasized the development of domestic oil, gas, and nuclear power, and allowed the solar energy tax credits to expire while slashing funding for solar research and development. Reagan dismissed Denis Hayes and hundreds of employees of the Solar Energy Research Institute. Reagan’s vision appeared to have won the day by the mid-1980s, when global oil prices plummeted once more and helped drive many precarious solar energy ventures into bankruptcy. In 1986 the White House solar panels were unceremoniously removed from the roof and never reinstalled.
Cite this overview:
LaRiccia, Dante. “Overview: Solar Energy in the 1970s.” Energy History Online. Yale University. 2025. https://energyhistory.yale.edu/?page_id=3458&preview=true&_thumbnail_id=65.
Library Items
“Home of architect Richard Crowther, that is heated with solar energy collected by flat plate collectors. A flat black aluminum plate behind the glass absorbs sunlight and heats air forced between the glass and the black plate. The air is then forced through a bin containing several tons of two inch sized rocks, that store the heat. Because of extra special insulating features of this home, the solar heating system provides almost 90 percent of the heat needed,” May, 1975. 
“Close up of a solar heating panel in a modular house built near Corrales, New Mexico. Closed at night, the panel is dropped during the day to allow sunlight to pass through the glass and heat blackened 55-gallon drums filled with water,” April, 1974 
“Closeup of an experimental solar heating flat plate collector using bonded honeycomb material for an air heating system,” May, 1975 
“Solar heating and cooling demonstration project, which is funded by the national project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation,” May, 1975 
“Zome house using solar heating built near Corrales, New Mexico. The modular interconnected units are hexagon shaped with polyhedra roofs. Aluminum construction has an inner core of urethane foam for insulating efficiency. Glass walls covered at night pass sunlight to heat blackened 55-gallon drums filled with water,” April, 1974. 
“Den of a modular solar-heated house built near Corrales New Mexico, made of interconnected units of aluminum with a urethane foam core of insulation. Drums in the background are filled with water and retain the sun’s heat,” April, 1974.
Solar Energy Innovation, 1970s
In the mid-1970s, high oil prices and fears of energy scarcity spurred experimental home construction and new efforts to use the sun’s rays to generate heat and electricity. EPA photographers documented many of these innovative solar structures. Some hewed closely to traditional building design, while others presented dramatically new forms of construction.
Amory Lovins, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Foreign Affairs, 1976
In 1976, physicist and environmental activist Armory B. Lovins published an article, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” in Foreign Affairs. This excerpt from his article highlights what he termed “soft energy paths”: low-tech, environmentally safe, distributed energy forms including energy efficiency and renewable energy. How can Lovins’ article make us think about the multiplicity of environmental policy options that were under discussion in the 1970s?
President Jimmy Carter’s Remarks at White House Solar Panel Dedication Ceremony, 1979
President Jimmy Carter spoke on June 20, 1979, at the dedication ceremony for the 32 solar panels he had installed on the roof of the White House. The installation of the solar panels reflected the energy goal of his administration to achieve 20% renewable energy by 2000. How does Carter’s speech link solar power with a narrative of American technological prowess and innovation?
Ronald Reagan Interview on Energy, Economics, and the Environment, 1976
While President Jimmy Carter advocated energy conservation, government-funded research, and renewable sources, Ronald Reagan advocated strikingly different policies. Reagan favored deregulation for the fossil fuel industry and less government involvement in the energy sector. Here is Reagan in 1976 during a failed presidential bid expressing some of the perspectives that would dominate federal energy policy after Reagan won the presidency in 1980
Additional Readings
Behrman, Daniel. Routledge Revivals: Solar Energy (1979): The Awakening Science, 1st edition (Routledge, 2021).
Madrigal, Alexis. Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology (Hachette Books, 2011).
Perlin, John. Let It Shine: The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy (New World Library, 2022). Provides an overview of solar history and also has a chapter on solar in the 1970s and 1980s.
Scavo, Jordan. “False Dawn of a Solar Age: A History of Solar Heating and Power During the Energy Crisis, 1973-1986 – ProQuest” (University of California, Davis, 2015), https://www.proquest.com/openview/063ba5d9526a3cb4bfd23a4d0c8ceee6/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750.
Smil, Vaclav. “The Long Slow Rise of Solar and Wind,” Scientific American 310, no. 1 (2014): 52–57.
Author Bio
Dante LaRiccia is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Yale University. His research explores the entangled histories of U.S. colonial expansion and the globalization of the carbon economy during the twentieth century.