SOLAR TODAY - January/February 2012

solar had comparable performance and much greater reliability than active solar.

“What we contributed wasn’t so much from
a design sense; the architects were good at that.
We brought respectability. Passive solar grew
out of a hippie movement in New Mexico. The
engineering community was skeptical and even
scornful,” he said. “We were able to provide a
solid scientific basis to the whole field.”
For passive solar to attain a higher profile
in the next 25 years, Balcomb sees a need for
architects to “sell” customers on passive solar
during the design process. He believes this will
happen once user-friendly applications provide
architects with precise cost savings data for
techniques such as passive solar heating and
daylighting. Before he retired from the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in 2003,
Balcomb designed the computer program Ener-
gy- 10 in hopes of making that easy, accurate and
user-friendly.

“The costs are so low that it’s important to
do this first, before you consider other non-
passive applications. Saying this repeatedly is
important,” Balcomb said. “To understand the
tremendous power of that equation might be
critical in the upcoming years.”
Balcomb also mentions the traditional Euro-
pean emphasis on building science — the anal-
ysis of building materials and building energy
flows to optimize building performance — as
an area for advancement in the States. For this
reason, Balcomb looks forward to reviewing
abstracts as the passive solar chair for the ASES
National Solar Conference, World Renewable
Energy Forum 2012.

“It’s an international conference and we’re going to hear about the considerable amount of work that has been done in Europe,” he said. “After being out of the game for a while, it’s an opportunity to get myself up to speed on what’s happening.” — alEx aBdallaH

Balcomb | Balcomb House floor plan published in solar today, Sept/Oct 2006, “Passive Solar Comeback Ahead.”

Böer: Still Crusading
for Solar

Back in 1978, when global photovoltaic manufacturing production was around 500 kilowatts, Karl W. Böer was predicting major adoption of photovoltaics (PV). At $2 per watt, he told Solar Age magazine, we’d see a market develop worth more than $100 million. Today wholesale PV prices have plunged to $1.20 per watt, fueling a U.S. solar market worth $6 billion, and what seemed an optimistic vision at the time has proven to be conservative.

Böer has been ahead of this curve since the start. His interest in solar energy goes back to his time as a young physics professor during the ’60s and ’70s. As a member of the faculty, he founded the University of Delaware’s Institute for Energy Conversion in 1972. A year later, Böer and colleagues attracted international attention when they designed and built one of the world’s first PV-powered residences, Solar One. He’s also a founder and Fellow of ASES and a regular contributor and advisor to SOLAR TODAY.

Yet Böer is as surprised and disappointed as anyone by the United States’ lost lead in the

Doug Balcomb “What we contributed [to passive solar advancement] wasn’t so much from a design sense; the architects were good at that. We brought respectability.”

Böer easily foresees renewable energy contributing 60 percent to global energy supply by 2030. But in the United States, achieving that goal will depend on public education.