That New Energy Buzz Book

Putting a lot of chips on conservation and solar power

It hardly seems the stuff of which bestsellers are made. Academic in tone, occasionally plodding, inundated by footnotes, the nation's latest buzz book is not a fast summer read. Yet in only one month in the stores, more than 35,000 copies of Energy Future have been sold at $12.95 each, and Random House is beginning a fourth printing.

Energy Future is the result of a six-year project directed by Professor Robert Stobaugh of the Harvard Business School and the book's co-editor, Political Scientist Daniel Yergin, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; five Harvard Business School faculty members and doctoral candidates contributed to the book. Some chapters were written by one or two team members, but the whole group supported the findings.

Though Harvard sponsored the project, the university does not endorse works done by its faculty.

In large part, the book is popular because fervid environmentalists can find in it justification for their thesis that nuclear power and coal are dirty, dangerous and unreliable, while solar energy and conservation are good and can provide the necessary energy. Yet the authors take pains to distance themselves from the small but vocal faction of extremists who hope that energy shortages will hold back technology, slow industrial growth, break up large industry and fragment society into smaller groups of people, tending their own gardens and building their own windmills. As the Harvard experts stress in Chapter One: "We do not side with those romanticists who have a vision of the national life decentralized in many spheres through the mechanism of the energy crisis to a point where it becomes a post-industrial pastoral society."

The book's basic thesis, which was reported in Foreign Affairs and TIME last spring, is both conventional and incontestable. It is that the nation's four basic fuels--petroleum, natural gas, coal and nuclear--are either depleting or face strong public opposition, and new energy sources must be phased in before the old are totally exhausted. The surprising aspect of Energy Future is its optimistic assessment of the potential of solar energy and conservation to carry the load as those "new sources."

The chapter on solar energy, written by Modesto A. Maidique, a business school assistant professor, is unabashedly bullish: "Given reasonable incentives, we believe that solar could provide between a fifth and a quarter of the nation's energy requirements by the turn of the century." The Harvard researchers have adopted the Department of Energy's extremely broad definition of solar to include not only power from the sun's rays but also hydropower and energy derived from the burning of "biomass," which includes wood, plants and other organic matter. The chapter's supposition is that rising costs of fossil fuels will make the installation price of solar heating an extremely attractive investment to homeowners, yielding as much as 17% annually. Although the Harvard researchers propose more than $1 billion in Government subsidies for research into high-technology solar devices, such as sun-deflecting satellites and photovoltaic cells, they assert that "new technology is not required to realize solar's potential."

Those assumptions are highly questionable. At present, broadly defined solar provides less than 6% of the nation's energy needs; some other studies anticipate that solar could supply no more than 10% by the year 2000.

The conservation chapter, written by Yergin, is more persuasive though somewhat extravagant. He argues that with only minor adjustments in life-style and no decline in economic growth, Americans could consume 30% to 40% less energy than they do today. In the book's best passages, Yergin cites illustrations ranging from Dow Chemical's 40% reduction in energy use to Colgate-Palmolive's 18% cutback to show that many companies have continued to expand while saving energy. The examples are impressive. Nonetheless, there is a critical point at which sizable reductions in energy could provoke a tailspin in U.S. industrial expansion.

Yergin also points out that buildings and residences, which now use 38% of the nation's energy, could be made much more fuel-efficient. The need is for intelligent construction codes and relatively simple improvements in insulation. All told, the Harvard team believes that solar and conservation can cover 22% of the nation's energy needs by the late 1980s --and up to 40% by century's end. These are enormously high estimates.

At the other extreme, the Harvard study is gloomy to the point of being defeatist about fossil fuels. Energy Future offers no hope that much new oil can be found in drilled-out America. The authors largely write off as impractical the attempts to recover left-behind oil in old wells. Natural gas, in their view, also has a dim future because proven reserves have been steadily shrinking. Even before Three Mile Island, notes the book, nuclear power was declining. Finally, mining, transportation and pollution problems rule out big increases in coal production.

The book's main flaw is that it gives up too quickly on the existing fuels, while placing too much faith on the unproven performance of solar and conservation. Both of those deserve to be encouraged, but so do existing and future fuels. Oil can be stretched by technological ingenuity, and the potential for developing the nation's shale resources is vast.

The book went to press, of course, before President Carter made his bold proposal for a crash program to produce synthetic fuels from sources as varied as shale, coal, sugar beets and even garbage. Congressmen are increasingly worried that his program may be too costly, too ambitious, too bureaucratic. Yet synfuel is precisely the sort of project, though dismissed by the Harvard experts in advance, that holds tremendous promise. Already, synfuel is being produced economically abroad. For the U.S. to downplay it and put most of its chips on solar and conservation would be a bad bet.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.