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Why wouldn't it be fair to expand the slice - 4% (1973 -
Bureau of Mines) given to hydroelectric power by a
similar factor of efficiency - for the solar energy
consumed in raising the water to its working head? After
all, in most cases, the rain or snow fell through long
unexploited distances before it went to work in a power
plant.
Then there is the question of heating houses. Every time
the sun shines on the surface of a house and especially
when it shines through a window there is " solar heating"
to some extent. How do we measure this? How do we
account for this in our discussions of energy use?
According to the NSF/NASA Energy Panel of 1972, the
percentage of thermal energy for building supplied by the
sun was too small to be measurable. But is that
accurate? Shouldn't we recalculate the energy
consumption of every building assuming it were kept in
the shade all day and then attribute the difference between
this amount and its actual consumption to solar energy?
In most cases this would result in an enormous
difference. Almost every building is solar heated to some
extent. I would guess the average shaded fuel
consumption to be at least 15% higher, and then of
course our next concern in heating the building is what
keeps the earth as warm as it is? What supplies the
United States with the necessary energy to maintain an
average absolute zero? This is a heating contract no oil
company would be quick to try and fill.
Clearly it would be a very difficult thing to account for
every calorie or Btu that passed through us or by us every
day in the various forms. It doesn't seem to be a
particularly urgent job, but it is very important to examine
what the limits of an accounting system are- to know
what the numbers and quantities displayed really mean.
If you go to a drive-in movie to watch the flickering lights
on a screen, the energy consumption of the automobile
and the drive-in is dutifully recorded and appears in the
statistics. If you walk out on a hillside, lie on your back
and look at the stars, no attempt is made to measure the
power output of the distant stars.
I don't advocate an enormous effort to measure all these
things. It would just be more helpful if the graphs stated
more clearly what they are about.
The design of houses can be stilted by such graphs. Now
that the experts have started this infantile accounting
system, which evidently finds us completely independent
of the sun, solar energy will be admitted only so long as it
has been properly collected, stored and transferred.
Legislation aimed at encouraging the use of solar energy
equipment by subsidizing the price of certain hardware
must end by being pathetic and blundering. It would take
an enormous crew of experts to determine the efficiency
of different orientations of windows, different
arrangements of shade trees, etc., etc. To ignore these
efforts and only to reward the purchaser of "off the shelf
hardware" is to further the disease of narrow minded
quantification.
It should be pointed out to the people promoting the use
of solar energy in the place of fossil fuels that the
accounting systems used by the experts are rigged against
them. As I understand it, we are being prepared to accept
that there are legitimate and illegitimate ways of using the
sun. If you purchase certain kinds of hardware to exploit
solar energy it will be accounted for and a credit will be
given to the sun. If you depend on more customary old
fashioned uses of solar energy, growing food, drying
clothes, sun bathing, warming a house with south
windows, the sun credit is totally ignored.

Our present accounting system with its promise of a
credit to the sun after the right hardware has been
installed can only discourage good house design. If the
natural solar contribution to house heating from windows
is ignored, then the designer knows that expanding this
share done by the sun will also be ignored. No tax
incentives - no credit given to the sun in ERDA’s graphs.

I think we would be much better informed if alongside
every graph showing our use of oil, coal and uranium
there were also an indication of the total energy received
by the sun. Since we can’t do without it, let’s not omit it
from our accounts. In the case of the United States, a
conservative estimate of the solar energy received in one
year might be:
(3,000,000) square miles (52802) ft.2/mile2 x 350 x
lO3Btu received/ft2/year = 3 x 106x (5.28)2 x 106 x 3.5
x 10 = 293 x 10’7Btu/year. Twenty nine thousand three
hundred quadrillion Btu as opposed to the 62 quadrillion
shown as used during 1968 by the U.S. Bureau of Mines.

When small children first start paying close attention to
money and to their allowances they briefly commit their
whole minds to their few coins and what chores they did
to earn them - without even considering the budget of the
family’s household. We can’t allow our entire civilization
to be similarly ignorant for long. We must ask who’s
keeping score and why they have such peculiar methods.