A slight chill in the air

A shadow hangs over the booming solar industry that no one can quite explain.

Big corporations have moved into the business. Homeowners, homebuilders, schools, even city halls are snapping up the technology. So why does fast-growing, progressive Oregon have fewer solar-heated homes today than in 1990?

No one knows for sure.

Next door, Washington State saw its total of solar-heated homes fall by half between 1990 and 2000, according to new census data. So did Kansas and New Hampshire, with Illinois (down 32 percent) and Nevada (down 42 percent) not far behind. Of the 22 states for which the Census Bureau has released data, only three saw an increase. Even there, gains were minimal.

These numbers so baffle solar-power experts that many dismiss them out of hand. They're seeing a renaissance of solar and other green building technologies. And, admittedly, homes that rely mainly on solar heat represent a small share of the households that tap the sun to heat their hot water, keep their pools comfortable, and create electricity.

Still, the decline suggests two trends. First, today's designers are using solar heating as a savvy complement to other fuels rather than as a replacement. Second, solar's first boom, fueled by federal tax incentives in the late 1970s and early '80s, proved to be an unsustainable fad.

It's that last conclusion that casts the troubling shadow. While builders are installing new systems at breakneck speed, they're also ripping out old ones. "There were a lot of systems in the late '70s and early '80s that weren't properly done," says Richard Perez, publisher of Home Power magazine in Ashland, Ore.

The challenge now facing the industry is to make sure that this second boom doesn't repeat the mistakes of the first.

When architect Craig Weston designed his first home 17 years ago, he wanted it as fuel-efficient as possible. He oriented the structure the right way, built a massive chimney to absorb the rays of the winter sun, installed a brick floor, and put in a wood stove. The house cost less than $100 to heat in the winter, since he could burn wood from the forest out back.

But as his family increased and his St. Louis suburb developed, he grew dissatisfied. He had to pay for wood now. Lugging in the logs was dull and dirty work. His heat-collecting greenhouse required constant attention. And the brick floor kept getting dirty. "You needed an instructional manual to live in it," he recalls.

So in 1997, when he designed his family's next passive-solar house, he nixed the wood stove, the greenhouse, and the brick floor. Gas heat supplements the solar heat trapped in the winter. The dark ceramic tile on the first floor doesn't absorb heat as well as brick but it's easier to clean.

"We do no work here," says Mr. Weston contentedly. Yet, this extremely well-insulated, properly oriented structure has less than half the heating costs of the homes of some of his neighbors. During the area's notoriously hot summers, he pays no more than $40 a month on air conditioning.

Meanwhile, the people who bought his old home have removed some of its energy-saving features and no longer use others. Indeed, many people have turned their backs on sun-powered technology that once fired their imaginations.

Some do it for aesthetic reasons; others, because of economics. Solar advocates say it doesn't make economic sense to tear out systems providing essentially free energy if they're already paid for. But life isn't always so simple.

Two decades ago, Phil Best put solar collectors on his garage to heat water in his Mansfield Center, Conn., home. For 15 years, the system cut substantially the amount he spent running his electric water heater. But in 1995, he changed to cheaper oil heat and disconnected the solar heat.

"It was just not viable," he explains. The location of the oil-fired heater would have meant running a copper pipe the length of the house. And the solar system itself needed work.

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