Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values

Energy policies that promote new technologies and energy sources are policies for the future. They influence the shape of emergent technological systems and condition our social, political, and economic lives. Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values demonstrates the difficulties that individuals in and out of government encounter when they try to instigate a reconsideration of these broader properties of technological systems and the policies that support them. This historical case study analyzes U.S. renewable energy policy from the end of World War II through the energy crisis of the 1970s. The book illuminates the ways in which beliefs and values come to dominate official problem frames and get entrenched in institutions. In doing so it also explains why advocates of renewable energy have often faced ideological opposition, and why policy makers failed to take them seriously.