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Comment by fsociety999 | Hacker News Reader

This article puts “roof repairs” in quotes to suggest that was an excuse, but it sounds like that actually happened from what I can tell. I think this answer on Quora provides a more reasonable explanation about why they were removed:

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-Reagan-administration-remo...

At the time they were not very effective at all and super costly to operate. They were intended more as a public relations promotion than anything else.

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I think it is important to remember that anti-renewables messaging has been around for a very long time. The panels might have needed to come off for repairs but definitely could have been put back up. Casually discarding even a public relations action like this likely had negative impacts on the discussion and many people taking the issue seriously for years to come. I don't know specifically how anti-renewables Regan was personally, but he definitely was the leader of a party that most strongly fought climate change messaging and actions in recent years.

Here is Carl Sagan testifying before congress in 1985 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI

Admittedly this hasn't necessarily been as strongly polarizing as it was during the 2010s, there was a time that it was a bipartisan issue that unified both parties in the interest of reducing foreign energy dependence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzDjjUAt3zc

I remember my dad talking, in the 90s, about how silly the solar panels were and how good it was that Reagan took them off. It's how I became aware of that having happened, in the first place, in fact.

Whatever the intent behind removing them, by the time it filtered through pop culture and the media, the message was "Reagan thinks the solar panels were dumb and wasteful and you should too".

Right. Very valid point. It’s entirely possible removing them was partially politically motivated or perhaps more accurately, it was politically motivated to LEAVE them off after the work was complete.

It has traditionally not been in the best interests of many politicians (in both parties) to promote renewable energy over fossil fuels sadly.

It may have changed since then, but even the “Green New Deal” originally did not include cutting tax subsidies for fossil fuels as part of its terms.

> tax subsidies for fossil fuels

Does an industry that produces billions of dollars in profit per quarter really need subsidies?

I think we're seeing pretty clear evidence of it right now. Americans in sprawling cities that get used to low gas prices buy giant gas guzzling cars and then freak out like none other when prices go up. The subsidies are almost certainly helping to line some investor and executive pockets, but they probably also have some effect driving down prices.

Here is a question I have: if we had basic science pushing battery and solar and wind tech in the 1960s, how far would we have gone in effective alt energy on the grid that far back? Wind certainly would have been effective, it's just electric motors and windmills.

But how much of 1960s tech would have enabled LFP/Lithium Ion densities and the various solar cell efficiencies? I get that silicon cells are reliant on fab technology, but perovskites and others?

We would likely have gotten a lot farther, a lot sooner. It's not so much that the tech was advanced back then or directly transferable to what we have today, it wasn't and isn't. But we spent decades with individuals and small companies basically operating in the wilderness due to lack of funding and demand to advance the state of the art faster. Had the funding existed back then it's entirely possible that there would have been developments in directions (out of necessity) that no one is even thinking about today.

Solar panels have had customers with deep pockets and need for good performance for space applications since the beginning. Of course, the deep pockets and low volumes meant that they wouldn't be optimized for cost.

Sure, but the orders of magnitude of investment and resulting rate of progress aren't comparable.[1] Understanding the world/existence can't compete with cat pictures and blowing stuff up in video games. The consumer market makes government spending look feeble and comical in comparison. While the industry has been more or less bounded by metrics like Moore's Law over the decades, exploding volumes dramatically altered the price/performance delivered.

[1] I'm only talking about the raw price/performance of the capabilities delivered and not the societal value of the respective results.

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