concepts · updated 2026-08-10
1973 NSF solar meeting
confidence: medium volatility: cold verified: 2026-08-10fresh
Meeting on solar heating and air conditioning of buildings, Washington DC, March 21-23, 1973, sponsored by NSF and the University of Maryland. Industry panelists (Alcoa, Texas Instruments) sat at a long table on a raised platform while Harry Thomason -- builder of three working solar houses in DC -- was kept in the audience. Baer's firsthand account in Sunspots Ch. 11 made it his central evidence for industry capture of government solar funding.
A meeting on solar heating and solar air conditioning of buildings, held in Washington, DC, March 21–23, 1973, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the University of Maryland. Steve Baer attended and wrote the archive’s only account of it — Chapter 11.1 of Sunspots (1975).
Who sat at the table
Industry representatives were assembled for a panel discussion at a long table on a raised platform. Baer’s estimate of the entry ticket: “somewhere around $30,000,000 sales per year was the minimum; less than that and you are not considered part of American industry.” Most of the panelists “knew nothing about solar energy”; Alcoa Aluminum and Texas Instruments did have “interesting comments and news of products.”
Who sat in the audience
Harry Thomason and his son Jack had built three successful solar-heated houses in Washington, DC — they lived in one and rented the other two — “certainly a successful small solar energy industry; but Harry was kept in the audience. He has not received money from NSF or any other government agency.”
The prevailing attitude was that enormous corporations must enter the field for solar heating to become “feasible.” A comment from industry: “The worst thing in the world to do would be to rush ahead and build solar houses prematurely—before all the bugs are worked out—it will give solar heating a bad name.” Thomason’s counter-perspective: he and Jack could climb on their roof and hammer together a heat collector for $1–2 a square foot, but once corporations began mass production those simple methods would be forgotten and the price would climb.
Baer also recorded the theater around Representative McCormick of Washington State — attendees were instructed the day before how to behave and where to group for pictures (“It reminded me of the Army”) — and his sense that “both Donovan and Herwig, the top men in NSF for solar heating, saw exactly what was happening, but neither man was going to be so bold as to try and change it.”
Why it matters in the archive
After “listening to the meeting for three days,” Baer formulated the two metaphors that anchor his policy argument in Sunspots — Solar Insecticide (government grants as sterile male insects that crowd out fertile ones) and Solar Vaccination (research money as a vaccination against “the full-blown disease of solar energy utilization”). Zomeworks’ own luck with NSF proposals was “0 — actually less than 0 figuring the time wasted writing proposals.” The Thomason-in-the-audience contrast is the archive’s sharpest concrete evidence for Baer’s argument that government solar funding was captured by large industry — a critique that prefigures the Sunmen manifesto by 29 years.