Solar company celebrates anniversary

The history of residential solar photovoltaics

 by Jeff Spies (thanks Jeff for letting us repost this, really well written)

May.25, 2010

The history of residential solar photovoltaics (solar pv) is closely connected to the “back to the land” movement that started in the late 1960’s. These “back to the land” migrations attracted hippies that were intent upon living off the land. They were focused on wise resource management due to frugal finances, and they were focused on sustainability due to a respect for natural resources. The popular hotspots in this “back to the land” movement included Northern California, central Oregon, the Ozarks, and the Rockies. These hippie havens produced many solar pioneers in the 70’s and 80’s that would make a major contribution to the development of the PV market.

Here are a few of the stories of the characters that colored the history of the solar PV movement.

David Katz (AEE Solar CEO & founder) grew up in Maryland and attended the University of Maryland in the early 70’s. After getting his degree in Electrical Engineering he continued to operate the business that helped finance his college education – Volkswagen Beetle mechanic. His mother was not too thrilled that her son who had just earned his degree in Electrical Engineering was continuing to wrench on Beetles, so unbeknownst to David, she submitted an application on his behalf to the Federal Government, and wouldn’t you know… they called him for a job interview. David figured “what the heck” and he decided to interview for the job.

As it happened, the Dept of Defense had 3 jobs they needed to fill within 24 hours (or they lost the funds), so after a phone interview, they hired David (sight unseen) to work as an electrical engineer in their facility at the Alameda Naval Station in Oakland, CA. David still carries his Dept of Defense ID photo ID showing his picture as a young man with a long hippie hairstyle and a big bushy beard. Quite the conversation starter

David really liked his job with the DOD, but after a few years (in 1978) he decided to join a group of his friends that were moving to a remote part of California called Redway, located 4 hours drive north of San Francisco.

Land was really cheap at that time due to the depressed logging economy and you could purchase a 40 acres parcel for $400/acre. David paid his $16,000 and proceeded to build his cabin in the woods. Since David had no real prospects for an engineering job in this economically depressed remote area, he reverted to his previous profession of auto mechanic. Again David went back to wrenching on beetles (I wonder what his mother thought).

Now it is important to understand a bit about the area. The Redway area has few paved roads even today. The terrain is incredibly rugged and criss-crossed with streams, creeks, rivers. There are significant geological barriers including ravines, hills, and mountains. In the 60’s and 70’s these homesteaders lived with very few modern luxuries.  Almost all these remote homes were lit by kerosene lanterns and for most, refrigeration meant an icebox, although a few of the “wealthier” hippies had a propane refrigerator.  Water supplies typically came from the numerous springs that fed catchment systems, but for those few without gravity water supply, water pumping was done with gas powered water pumps. Most residents did not have electricity at their homes, and the cost to run power to these remote homesteads was out of reach for almost all “back to the landers”.  This resulted in a major dilemma, no electricity meant no music.

Motivated by STRONG desire to bring music into their remote homes, area residents began running car stereos from their automotive battery in their homes. Of course, if you run the stereo too long, you could discharge the car battery too far and not be able to start your car. Since the closest jump start might be miles away, several backyard mechanics including David Katz decided to add a second  battery  for home power use in the back seat of their car or trunk.

Since David was again working as an auto-mechanic, he started helping people convert their automobiles to this new “dual-battery charging system”.   They were simple devices consisting of a switch and relay. After driving for 10 minutes to charge the car battery, the driver would flip a switch and start to charge the home power battery stored in the back seat or trunk.  When he returned home from his drive, he would drive the car right up next to his house and plug the house into the car. Now homeowners had ready access to 12 Volt DC power for their lights and stereo.  Finally, the homesteaders had some music! Of course this arrangement required frequent drives to keep the home power battery charged up, but that was an acceptable price to pay to bring music into their homes.

This was the start of David’s venture into the world of “alternative” energy. David changed the name of his business from “Red Star Automotive” to “Alternative Energy Engineering” in 1979 and started to sell a range of backwoods electrical products including dual battery charging systems, extension cords, 12 volt lights, boom boxes, wind generators, water wheel generators, and solar water heating panels.

David is a real techno gadget geek and often spends time wandering the aisles of electronics superstores searching for that next electronic gadget that he never knew existed and just can live without. In 1980, David decided to attend the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and while touring the exhibits, he came across the booth of a company selling solar powered toys, lawn ornaments, and gadgets. David was intrigued by the PV cell technology and started picking the brain of the salesman working the booth. After a short while, David noticed a tall rectangular panel leaning against the wall behind the booth. This panel had PV cells plastered all over it and David asked the salesman what it was. The salesman replied “oh, that is nothing you would be interested in”. David persisted and asked again, to which the salesman replied, “that PV panel has no real application”, which was true considering the market at that time was the space program and lawn ornaments.

David finally got the salesman to explain that this panel was a 35 Watt Arco Solar PV module. When placed in the sun, the module would product 35 watts of power. David told the salesman, “I think I have an application for those” and he purchased 100 of those 35 Watt Arco solar PV modules and shipped them to himself via general delivery to the Redway post office.

David ended up selling all 100 modules within one week to the same customers that he had helped with the dual battery charging systems. Now people could take the heavy batteries out of their back seat and put them in the house with a quiet reliable solar module to charge them, giving them home power for lighting and music. This was the first documented case of a large volume of solar PV modules being purchased for residential home power making David Katz a true pioneer of Solar PV.

Charlie Wilson (AEE Solar employee #1) is a self proclaimed renewable energy evangelist – a true believer. He started his career as an electronics tech working in the defense industry and then for Stanford artificial intelligence lab in the early 70’s working with robotic manipulators and motor drives. In 1974, Charlie read the book “Energy Primer”. This book sparked Charlie’s interest in renewable energy. It was very technical with heavy emphasis on the engineering and math of electrical and heating systems.  Energy Primer covered the use of many technologies for generating power from alternative sources including water wheels, windmills, solar thermal, solar hot air, and wood fired water heating, however, solar PV was not yet available to the consumer markets and the book only addressed it in theory.

Charlie moved to the remote area known as the “Lost Coast” of California about 20 miles west of Garberville in 1974. He built his first wind generator for home power in 1974 before solar pv was on the scene.  In 1977 Edmond Scientific started selling pv cells in their catalog and soon after Charlie built his first solar PV module for charging batteries for a boom box for his neighbor. In 1978, he started work at “Open Circle” an audio supply store in Garberville. His neighbor wanted a DC turntable for use with his DC battery system. Up until that time, all home stereo equipment ran on AC power and Charlie convinced the store owner to allow him to open up the bottom of a turntable and look at the electronics to determine if it could be converted to DC power. Upon opening the the case, he noted that the DC motor circuit used a 15 Volt capacitor so he figured that the turntable could run off a 12 volt battery. He tried it and it worked! He converted one for his neighbor and he also made one for himself. Soon after Charlie became more involved with helping Humboldt county homesteaders build DC powered stereos.

Charlie recalls the first commercial PV panels he ever saw were the 6 Volt William Lamb (Bill Lamb) modules for battery charging for campers. The market to that point was the space program and a couple industrial niche applications including small telecom power systems, and corrosion protection. Soon after the introduction of these pv cell battery chargers were introduced, they started finding their way into use in the hills around Redway. In the early years the need for power for Redway residents was primarily directed at TV’s and boom boxes. This was much more important than lighting to area residents.

David Katz was one of several backyard mechanics in the Redway area that had started selling extension cords and power supplies to hook car batteries to lights and stereos. Charlie thought that David would be more fun to work for and he quit his job with Open Circle and went to work for Alternative Energy Engineering  at the original location in Briceland (previously the site of an old church). It was a miniscule store selling wind generators and waterwheels, but in the early years, most the business was selling 12 volt lights and boom boxes. The first pv modules that Alternative Energy Engineering sold were the 35 watt ARCO 2300 series.  The original sell price was about $400 which was over $11/watt in 1980 dollars!

Another early motivator for solar PV was home lighting. Most homesteaders in those days used kerosene lanterns for lighting.  Many of these lanterns exhibited the occasional problem with “thermal runaway”, especially the Aladdin lamp.  The Aladding was very bright, but it would occasionally get hot enough to cause a vapor feedback loop that produced a sooty red flame 6″ – 12″ above the chimney. Sadly, this was the cause of many cabins burning down in the early years of the “back-to-the-land” movement. Since the summer in Redway is bone dry, burning down your cabin often meant burning down your hillside and the homes of many of your neighbors. So while the early motivation for off-grid electricity was music, the introduction of 12 volt lighting to homesteads had a noticeable effect on reducing cabin fires and promoting the usage of electrical lights instead of kerosene lanterns.

Charlie remembers 2 pivotal incidents in the late 80’s that convinced him that solar had a bigger future than powering hippie stereos in the backcountry.

First, it is important to appreciate that Garberville and Redway in the 60’s and 70’s were towns that had hit hard times. Half the buildings and homes were boarded up. The lumber boom of the 50’s was over and mills were shutting down throughout the Pacific Northwest. Garberville had a reputation as a smelly town due to the smoldering garbage dump on the edge of town, and in fact locals often referred to it as Garbage-Ville. Compounding these problems were the closure of state and federal park lands to preserve the giant redwoods and prevent their extinction. Sadly, this increased tensions and anger towards hippies in the area by the logging and ranching communities around Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties .

The first incident occured one day in the late 80’s when an old rancher came into the store and told Charlie that his 25 year old diesel generator was worn out and he was spending a lot of time keeping it running. The rancher ended up hanging out all day at the AEE store picking Charlie’s brain about solar pv. Shortly after that conversation the rancher purchased a $10K solar pv system instead of a new diesel generator. 2 weeks later he brought another rancher friend of his into the AEE store and he also bought a $10K solar pv system.

The second incident involved a lumber company in Eureka. The company had a pier that extended into the bay with a work shed at end of pier. The shed was used for office work and the lumber company engineer decided it would be cheaper to use a PV module, charger, and battery, than stringing cable and trenching for conduit for the electric power needed for the lighting in the small office space.

Charlie realized that if a conservative lumber company and conservative ranchers were willing to buy a solar panels from a bunch of hippies, then there might be larger things in store for this technology, but few at that time could have predicted the explosive growth that was to come.

The blend of idealism, wise resource management, respect for the environment, and hippie ingenuity in the Redway community helped to make solar photovoltaic electricity a technology for the masses. Pioneers like Charlie Wilson played a pivotal role in helping this technology advance to the point that is could become a mainstream form of power generation for applications beyond the hippie music market.

In 1981 Charlie’s wife Cietha created the “Power to the People” logo that today stands as an industry icon. This logo features a raised fist with a lighting bolt entering the fist and an electric plug coming out. Solar pioneers like Charlie Wilson and David Katz really did help bring “Power to the People.

Steve and Elizabeth Willey (founders of Backwoods Solar – Sand Point ID) bought their property in rural Sand Point ID in ‘73 and moved into their new homestead with a school bus serving as their home. After settling into their new land, they called the power company to see about getting access to the electric utility grid, but the power company quoted a connection fee of $10,000 (a small fortune at the time). This was more money than the Willey’s paid for their land. Since Steve had a background in workbench electronics he went to work and devised a DC gas powered generator to charge a battery for music and home lighting. Shortly after commissioning his new off-grid battery system, Steve started helping neighbors to do the same thing. This grew into a teaching position with a local extension college in Sand Point, ID where Steve started to teach other homesteaders how to build their own off-grid electrical generation system.s

Steve and Liz started their business selling gas powered generators, water-wheels, and windmills, and in 1978 the Willeys got dealership for Windco wind generator. At the time PV did not really exist commercially. Steve remembers seeing PV chargers in hobby magazines in the mid 70’s but it was not until late 70’s that these products started to be sold to the commercial markets.

In 1980 Steve first saw his first solar PV module selling in Edmond scientific catalog for $1700. He noted that the name on the module was Solarex, and after some research he located a company in Boise (Alster communications) selling these modules to the telecom market. Steve ended up buying his first Solarex modules from Alster for $400 each

On May 20, 1980 Steve Willey delivered his first solar PV module to a nurse that lived on a remote mountain in Washington State. She needed power for a radio, an 8-track tape deck, and a light. Up till that point, she would once a week backpack a heavy lead acid battery 1/4 mile down the hill to charge it in town and then hike it back uphill to her home after it was fully charged. Steve delivered the first 15 W Solarex module on his motorcycle to the location. After leaving her house he noticed a huge black cloud and thought that he would be caught in a rainstorm, but it was actually the cloud from the eruption of Mount St Helens (making the date even more memorable for Steve and Liz). Shortly after his first sales success, Steve went on a sales promotional tour on his motorcycle carrying a module and water pump to all the homes he could find that did not have power lines. People were amazed that this solar module could be used for water pumping and the Willy’s slowly started to build their business by selling electrical PV power systems to homesteaders.

Most products in those days were cobbled together with items from marine supply sources and surplus electronics catalogs. Most users started with one panel and one battery, and no charge control. They just used a voltmeter and (hopefully) disconnected the module when the battery reached a full state of charge. While there were no commercially available battery charge controllers, there were countless home brew electronic charge controls created to prevent the batteries from being overcharged and ruined. Unfortunately, only a handful of people possessed the knowhow to do the improvising. The hobbyists continued to advance the technology with their home brew creations, but it was more of a hobby than a business for the first decade. Despite the fact that the Willeys did not make any money from the business in the first 10 years, Steve and Liz loved the technology and were active promoters of the concept of using quiet reliable PV modules to charge batteries.

All early off-grid power was DC only. The focus was stereo conversions to bring music into the backcountry homes. The popular arrangement was a bank of gel cells that charged from the solar array and then with a flip of the switch, the batteries would be configured in series to provide the needed voltage to power a stereo. Sunfrost refrigerators in the late 80’s were a major advancement for homesteaders since they used a only small fraction of the power of conventional refrigerators, and they did not require an AC inverter. The early inverters (Tripplite) were expensive and not very robust, but in the early to mid 80’s Heart introduced the first real practical inverter used in PV systems. This product worked well, but was plagued with problems and failures. Several years later, Trace Engineering introduced a unit was much more reliable – albeit still expensive. The Trace inverter almost never failed, and Heart soon introduced more reliable inverters to match the Trace Engineering products. Reliable inverters dramatically expanded the possibilities of an off grid system and allowed remote homesteaders to use the full range of electronic devices common to everyday life for the masses.

It took 10 years before the Willeys could make solar their main business. All profits for the entire first decade were plowed back into the business. There was never a year that the business did not grow with the exception of the year 2000 when sales dropped a bit from the massive upsurge in 1999. Backwoods eventually decided to focus exclusively on the off-grid market when the explosion in the grid-tie market started to occur. While many of these original solar offgrid pioneers like the Willeys did not migrate very far into the grid tie market, their engineering contributions in the off-grid sector had a major impact in the foundations of the grid-tie solar industry.

 by Jeff Spies (thanks Jeff for letting us repost this, really well written)