The energy crisis provided a unique opportunity for solar advocates of all types. The public's and policy makers' loss of confidence in conventional energy policy opened the way for advocates to argue for new ways of looking at energy policy and the role of solar technology in it. Concurrently, the solar movement began to incorporate influences from some of the other social movements of the day, including environmentalism and radical critiques of technological society. Bringing these issues into the debate split the solar movement, as competing elements within it articulated different visions of society and the role of solar energy in it.

PUBLICLY CONSTRUCTING SOLAR ENERGY

During the energy crisis, solar advocates produced a rapidly increasing volume of articles and books that argued for more attention to and resources for solar energy. The multiplicity of solar advocates can again, for our purposes, be divided into two categories. The modest differences that separated solar advocates in the 1950s and 1960s deepened in the 1970s, with the more ambitious advocates tying their advocacy of solar energy tightly to strong environmental values and often to whole critiques of modern industrial capitalism. For this reason I name the more guarded advocates conventional and the more ambitious advocates ecological. Although any such classification scheme does some injustice to the many variations within each category, in the mid-1970s solar advocates began to diverge in the ideas and, particularly, the values that they associated with their technology and with energy technologies more generally.