The Passing of A Solar Pioneer
Let’s take a brief moment to mark the passing of 95-year-old solar power pioneer George Lof, who spent his long life showing people that alternative energy could work.
Lof’s own Denver home is thought to be the first solar powered house ever built and still generates half of its own heat, according to the Denver Post.
Lof, who received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technoloy, built his first solar-powered house in 1945 using U.S. War Production Board grants, according to The Wall Street Journal.
He predicted that by 1955, 13 million homes would have solar systems. That obviously didn’t happen, but he felt optimistic about the future of green energy, telling Denver University’s magazine last month:
“We are now at a point where solar is going to move ahead,” Lof says. “Instead of having to make solar cheaper, what needed to happen was for other fuel sources to become more expensive.”
His Solar Energy Application Laboratory at Colorado State University built a solar village with four homes powered by different solar systems in the 1970s.
He later founded Solaron Corp. in an attempt to make the technology commercially viable during the oil shocks of the 1970s.
The tax credits for solar systems, however, in the industry disappeared in 1985 and Solaron had to file for bankruptcy.
Lof opposed government research efforts though.
He told the Christian Science Monitor in 1981 that “federal programs have been one of our worst enemies,” because unworkable ideas pushed by government programs and the attendant high costs gave the industry a bad name.
How else can we say it? He was a man ahead of his time.
