"We had, in the Carter years, a well-developed plan to get 20 percent of nation's energy from renewable resources by the year 2000," Hayes says, and is confident they'd have made their mark if a series of policies had been enacted. "Unfortunately," Hayes says, "none of those policies were ever implemented."

Hayes identifies the moment when Carter embraced the 20 percent-call, over quite a few objections, as "the high point of solar energy in the United States."

Who is Hayes and what happened?

Denis Hayes, a senior researcher for Worldwatch Institute.... would move on to become director of the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI), which had been established in 1974 and became operational in July of 1977 in Golden, Colorado. (In 1991, SERI would become the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.) Hayes was a man ahead of the game and talked to reporters nearly 35 years ago about the "profound and irreversible alterations of global climate," and that we were already "behind schedule" for "solar transition"....

[Reagan is elected over Carter.]  As a possible sign of Reagan's interest, or lack thereof, in the field of energy, this would be the last cabinet position he'd get around to selecting.... Jim Edwards, the former governor of South Carolina, a dentist by profession, to be Secretary of Energy."

By June 1981, Dennis Hayes was out of a job; along with 370 of the gifted scientists and activists he had recruited. Reagan's distaste for all things solar was never more evident than by his dismantling of the solar panels Carter had placed atop the White House roof, but that display was only the beginning as the budget for solar development, along with subsidies and tax credits for the industry were slashed. With federal backing virtually wiped out overnight, young solar companies began to collapse and the industry as a whole was on the ropes....

Two presidential administrations, one on each side of the political line, put their support behind synfuels.... Hayes' Solar Institute budget spiraled from $124 million in 1980 to $59 million in 1982. Speaking of the $88 billion proposed for synfuels, Hayes says such a commitment to solar would have been "transformational," but $20 billion would have certainly done the trick....

the average for annual energy subsidies were as follows: (adjusted for inflation) oil and gas (1918-2009), $4.86 billion per year; nuclear (1947-1999), $3.50 billion per year; renewables (1994-2009), $0.37 billion per year.....

Llorens looks at solar's growth as somewhat unavoidable and foresees the United States leading the way as a global leader in installations, and with it, generating an immense amount of business, jobs and infrastructure. "Soon, I think that it will be impossible to ignore the fact that solar makes you money. There's this iceberg of a mindset, this paradigm, where people think it's for rich environmentalists -- it's not to save money. That's going to thaw pretty soon. People are going to start to get it."