The price of oil has spiked since late February, when the U.S. attacked Iran. Any time oil prices see a crazy rise, it makes other sources of energy look more attractive. We’ve had these inflection points before in U.S. history. Back in the 1970s, oil prices skyrocketed, and people started to innovate. But it didn’t stick, for a few reasons.
“We had all of this innovation that came off the sidelines,” said Deborah Gordon, who works at the energy think tank RMI.
In the late ’70s, she was in college, studying chemical engineering at the University of Colorado, and she said alternative forms of energy were the hot thing to work on. “I was working in a hydrogen catalysis lab in undergrad. Now, we're talking about hydrogen again, as if we weren't talking about it 50 years ago, which is kind of crazy,” she said. Gordon was working on ways to store hydrogen. This was one of many ideas people were exploring.
“People were trying everything they could,” said Cyrus Mody, who studies the history of science, technology, and innovation at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. “They were putting money into wind, solar, regular nuclear fission, biofuels, fuel cells, you name it.”
Mody said there was research being done by oil companies — but also, any company that could try to gin up some energy using whatever it had, went for it. “Aerospace companies were getting into it,” said Mody. “So, Grumman, for instance, got into wind power. Some of the satellite companies got into solar power because they already had some expertise in that.” Even the potato brand Ore-Ida, maker of Tater Tots, according to
a news report from 1979, was trying to figure out how it could get into geothermal energy, using its land in the Pacific Northwest.
“I think they did have some view to making money off of the geothermal hotspots that they owned,” Mody said. | 
