Who is responsible for the launch of the commercial solar industry?
Bell Labs?
NASA?
Jimmy Carter?
If you answered none of the above, you’re right.
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.
Hear the full conversation, including details on the film’s release, on the podcast above.
The Wild, Weird & Wonderful History of Solar
Energy Changemakers Podcast · Episode 54 · Show Notes
Host: Elisa Wood | Guests: Jeff Spies & Jason Vetterli | Runtime: ~43 min
About This Episode
Most people in solar assume the industry started with the trade-show boom of 2006–2007. It didn’t. It started decades earlier, in the logged-over hills of Humboldt County, California, where back-to-the-land hippies were hacking a self-sufficient life out of the wilderness — powering their homes off car batteries, micro-hydro, and windmills just so they could keep the lights on and play a little music.
Host Elisa Wood sits down with filmmakers Jeff Spies and Jason Vetterli, whose two-hour documentary Solar Roots: The Pioneers of PV traces how an expensive military, space, and petrochemical technology found its way into the hands of ordinary people — and, in doing so, became a real industry. It’s a story of catalog salesmen, off-grid homesteaders, cannabis-funded land deals, conservative ranchers won over one panel at a time, and a scrappy magazine that connected them all. Along the way, Jeff and Jason make the case for why solar has already won the price war, why the remaining fight is cultural, and why this history had to be captured now, while its pioneers are still here to tell it.
Guests & Host
Jeff Spies — Executive producer and narrator of Solar Roots. A longtime solar PV industry veteran (with a prior career in industrial automation) who entered PV in the mid-2000s, Jeff conceived the project, funded it, co-wrote it, and conducted the interviews.
Jason Vetterli — Director, cinematographer, co-writer, and editor of Solar Roots, with a background in Hollywood editing. He shot and assembled the entire film — including the closing “Solar Hippie Magic” sequence.
Elisa Wood — Host of the Energy Changemakers Podcast and author of the Energy Changemakers newsletter, covering distributed energy, microgrids, virtual power plants, and the decentralization of the grid.
Chapter Guide
00:00 Cold open — a colorful history most of solar has never heard
00:44 Show intro
01:07 Meet the filmmakers
02:20 Who did what on the film
04:11 Jeff’s path into the solar industry
05:53 Why tell the Solar Roots story
06:13 David Katz and the first spark
09:55 From technology to industry
11:33 Power to the people: NASA tech reaches the homestead
17:35 The Humboldt County off-grid boom (and cannabis cash flow)
23:21 How the interviewees were chosen
24:04 Peer-chosen voices
24:41 PV vs. solar water heating (the Jimmy Carter question)
25:33 A word from our sponsor — the Energy Changemakers newsletter
26:34 “Solar Hippie Magic” and words of wisdom
27:49 PV wins the price war
29:36 Home power and energy independence
30:28 The culture-war battleground
36:22 Capturing the pioneers before they’re gone
37:46 Where and how to watch the film
39:18 Making a two-hour documentary on nights and weekends
42:02 Final thanks and an invitation to the premiere
