Home ›› 12 Aug 2022 ›› Opinion
Steven Preister’s house in Washington, D.C. is a piece of American history, a gorgeous 110-year-old colonial with wooden columns and a front porch, perfect for relaxing in the summer. But Preister, who has owned it for almost four decades, is deeply concerned about the environment, so in 2014 he added something very modern: solar panels. First, he mounted panels on the back of the house, and they worked nicely. Then he decided to add more on the front, facing the street, and applied to the city for a permit.
Permission denied. Washington’s Historic Preservation Review Board ruled that front-facing panels would ruin the house’s historic appearance: “I applaud your greenness,” Chris Landis, an architect and board member, told Preister at a meeting in October 2019, “but I just have this vision of a row of houses with solar panels on the front of them and it just—it upsets me.” Some of Preister’s neighbors were equally dismayed and vowed to stop him. “There were two women on my front porch snapping pictures of my house and declaring, ‘You’ll never get solar panels on this house!’” Preister says.
Renewable energy is at a curious crossroads. It’s needed to avert further climate damage, and solar and wind power are now remarkably cheap. But even clean-energy proponents often dislike the aesthetics of the new technology. They’re happy for solar arrays and windmills to exist somewhere—just not within sight. Many homeowners’ associations refuse to let residents install panels.
This is the great new shift we’re facing. For decades, gas- and coal-fired plants were tucked far away from view. But now, power generation is visible all over. “There’s really no other energy source that people have that personal relationship with,” says Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group.
Yet this struggle has a long history. Ironically, coal itself faced a similar pushback in the early 19th century, when it was the newfangled power source that promised to solve many of the country’s problems.
Until the early 1800s, Americans burned very little coal. The country was thickly forested, and wood was cheap. Most houses had one or more wood fireplaces. The country didn’t have many factories that required serious energy, and coal was a niche fuel used, for example, by blacksmiths who needed high heat for their work.
But as cities grew rapidly and demanded ever more fuel, choppers quickly deforested surrounding areas. Firewood became scarce and expensive. By 1744, Benjamin Franklin was bemoaning the plight of his fellow Philadelphians: “Wood, our common Fewel, which within these 100 Years might be had at every Man’s Door, must now be fetch’d near 100 Miles to some towns, and makes a very considerable Article in the Expence of Families,” he wrote. Johann David Schoepf, a German physician and botanist who traveled through America during and after the Revolutionary War, fretted that all this wood-burning would not “leave for [American] grandchildren a bit of wood over which to hang the tea-kettle.” Part of the problem was that a fireplace was a profligate way to heat a house, since so much heat vanished up the chimney. “A lot of the open-hearth wood fires were just insanely inefficient,” says Christopher Jones, a historian at Arizona State University who studies early American power-generation.
America was sitting right atop the answer to this fuel crisis, in the form of massive piles of coal, particularly Pennsylvania’s lodes of anthracite, a dense, rocklike form of the stuff. Anthracite was ideal for burning in houses, because it didn’t produce as much smoke as “soft” bituminous coal. No longer simply the provenance of blacksmiths, coal became a hot commodity, and mining ramped up: Companies began increasingly ambitious anthracite digs, then began building canals and railroads to distribute the fuel to the East and South.
Smithsonian
