Who is responsible for the launch of the commercial solar industry?
- Bell Labs?
- NASA?
- Jimmy Carter?
- Jigar Shah?
If you answered none of the above, you’re right.
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Each was enormously influential. Bell Labs developed the silicon solar cell. NASA became its first customer. Jimmy Carter helped popularize solar. And Jigar Shah, much later, helped build a pivotal financing model.
But the commercialization of rooftop solar actually emerged from remote hippie enclaves more than half a century ago. Their motivation? Music.
That’s what documentarians Jeff Spies and Jason Vetterli found while researching their upcoming film, Solar Roots — the Pioneers of PV.
Back then, photovoltaics were mostly space hardware. Panels remained too expensive for homes. They were used for what the grid couldn’t reach cheaply — remote telecommunications equipment, navigation buoys, repeater stations, offshore oil platforms — places where extending a line or repeatedly replacing batteries cost even more.
“The vast majority of the PV industry in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s was strapping those things onto satellites and shooting them up into space,” Vetterli said. “How did this expensive military, industrial, petrochemical technology find its way into the hands of the people?”
It was through marijuana growers who lived hidden in remote outposts to avoid detection by law enforcement.
The market for what manufacturers called “terrestrial solar” was tiny; few buyers could justify the price. At that time, solar companies weren’t used to orders from anyone but government. Then they began noticing a spike in sales from places like Humboldt County, California — and it came after harvest season, when marijuana growers had cash to spend.
The David Katz mobile
Solar penciled out for the homesteaders because their alternative was worse: batteries charged by gasoline-powered vehicles, a workaround brought to them by alternative-energy guru David Katz, who later founded AEE Solar.
Katz’s setup was a rough precursor to today’s vehicle-to-home technology. He gave the off-gridders a two-battery system. One battery started the car. The second charged while driving, then went back to the cabin — where it powered the music.
“When PV modules came in to replace that,” Spies explained, “as expensive as they were… it still was cheaper than driving your car all the time to charge your home battery.”
Getting the stories before a generation disappears
Spies and Vetterli, both of whom work in the solar industry, went well beyond common sources in doing their research. They interviewed more than 80 pioneers — engineers, entrepreneurs, inventors, installers, historians and early off-grid adopters — many now in their 70s, 80s and 90s.
Among them are people who built early photovoltaic modules, founded some of the first solar companies, galvanized around Home Power magazine, and helped create today’s residential solar market. The filmmakers say the documentary captures firsthand accounts that might otherwise be lost as this founding generation ages and passes away.
Listen to the full conversation on Energy Changemakers Substack.
