Here is a nice article from the January 3, 2007, Los Angeles Times. It is the story of a small company that I helped start in about 1975 to construct solar energy applications. Sun Light & Power Company started in Point Richmond over 30 years ago. It was originally a subsidiary of Interactive Resources, operating under my contractor’s license.

Eventually, Sun Light & Power Company was “spun off” to pursue the construction of alternative energy applications, while Interactive Resources pursued design, engineering and consulting related to alternative energy applications and energy conservation.

This was many years before anyone even knew what “green” was, other than a type of thumb.

Interactive Resources was founded in 1973 during the “first energy crisis” precipitated by a Middle East oil embargo. Similar to what is occurring now in 2007, there was a great interest in energy conservation and alternative energy sources.

The founders of the firm, including me, plunged into architectural projects that demonstrated innovative ways to save energy. See http://www.tombutt.com/biography.htm.

Some of the first homes in the Bay Area to incorporate active and passive solar energy applications were designed by Interactive Resources. This set the pace in California in the years immediately following the energy crisis of 1973, influencing subsequent state energy conservation legislation and speeding the incorporation of energy conservation considerations into the mainstream of California architectural practice.

In 1975, Interactive Resources organized and implemented the first statewide California Solar Energy for Buildings Conference, repeated in 1976 and 1977 with hundreds of building industry professionals attending.

In 1976, I erected at my Point Richmond home the largest wind generator in California and the first to feed power into the PG&E grid. Fully instrumented by PG&E, it became a research project that paved the way for commercial wind power in California.

Until well into the 1980’s Interactive Resources remained a leading consultant in alternative energy applications and energy conservation in building, designing hundreds of projects incorporating passive and active solar heating and cooling, including six U.S. Government-sponsored grants for research or demonstration projects in solar energy, including the AIA Research Corporation Grant (sponsored by HUD) for Phase II Development of Energy Performance Standards for New Builders, 1978, and the Willow Park II Community Center Case Study, a DOE Research Project, 1983.

Today, we at Interactive Resources are returning to our roots. We are providing engineering support to SunLink, the largest supplier of solar PV system hardware in the United States. My son, Andrew Butt, AIA, is a certified LEED architect, and we are doing green building design.

Meanwhile, Sun Light & Power seems to be doing just fine. Wish I had kept some stock.

He's still following the sun
* Gary Gerber has pushed solar power for 30 years. Now that it's no longer the domain of hippies, he's really plugging in.

By Lee Romney, Times Staff Writer
Berkeley -- IN the beginning, to explain the concept of a solar water heater, Gary Gerber toted a homemade graphic of a black hose sitting on a lawn.

"Do you ever go out in the summer and turn on the hose and the water is hot?" he'd ask potential customers. "Well, that's how it works."

In those "stone age" days of the mid-1970s, there was no solar energy industry, Gerber says, only a small collection of "experimenters, forward-thinking people, inventors." Even eking out a living was an impossibility: Gerber survived, courtesy of a side gig selling cheese from his Volkswagen van.

Three decades later, his Sun Light & Power can barely keep up. A frenzied demand for solar power, or photovoltaic, installations has eclipsed the water heater portion of the business, and since 2002, sales have ballooned by about 66% annually -- to more than $11 million in 2006.

Once the domain of hippies, whose off-the-grid escape doubled as an anti-establishment rebuke, renewable energy is now a pillar of California politics. In recent months alone, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed the California Solar Initiative, which aims to help bring solar power to a million rooftops, as well as a landmark greenhouse-gas reduction law.

Cities in the Bay Area -- California's alternative-energy hotbed -- are tricking out public buildings with solar panels, outfitting municipal vehicle fleets with the latest plug-in hybrids and tweaking building codes to require energy-efficient features in new construction. Large companies are scrambling to certify their buildings as "green."

And across the state, in locations not at all off the beaten path, solar installations on homes and small businesses have soared, thanks largely to rebates for systems tied into the state power grid.

While 1998 saw 87 installations of such systems -- which relieve strain from conventional users in peak heat by feeding excess solar juice back to the grid -- the number exploded to more than 5,600 in 2006, with the Bay Area well in the lead, California Energy Commission data shows.

FOR Gerber, 53, it is a head-spinning state of affairs.

Curly-haired and soft-spoken, Gerber today looks the part of a steady engineer in his pressed khakis and checkered button-down shirt, four pens aligned in his front pocket. But he remains at heart a zealot, committed to renewable energy down to the solar watch on his wrist.

Though he is by no means the biggest player in the increasingly competitive industry, he is among a handful of believers who came of age in the mid-'70s boom, survived the gloom of the '80s and '90s and emerged to thrive in today's market.

"Gary's experience mirrors the industry's experience overall," said Brian Gitt, executive director of the nonprofit Build It Green, which promotes energy-efficient building in California. "Here's this pioneer who's been doing this for 30 years and weathered the hard times. Now, he's able to take advantage of the insane growth we're experiencing. It's equivalent to the beginning of the Internet boom."

Solar power has had previous brushes with the mass market: In 1891, Clarence M. Kemp designed the first commercial solar water heater.

"The Climax" was the wealthy household's alternative to heating water on the stove, and six years later, nearly a third of Pasadena homes sported one. But by the 1930s, use of plentiful natural gas had killed the Southland industry.

Interest revived after 1973 oil crisis.

The then-nascent industry focused on water heaters and passive thermal features to keep houses warm.

A company of young architects formed by Tom Butt -- now a Richmond city councilman -- hammered together homemade solar panels for testing in Butt's backyard. But they could find no contractors willing to build the projects they devised.

Word got to Gerber, who, one project shy of a master's degree in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, queried fellow students in 1974: Did anyone want to go into business?

The ragtag Sun Light & Power worked under Butt's contractor's license and built solar collectors from scratch, with redwood framing and fluorescent tubing. The first customers: Gerber's parents.

Ideas were hardly proprietary. Extra copper for one of Gerber's early projects came from the "Integral Urban House" on Berkeley's 4th Street, a utopian experiment of the Farallones Institute, the renowned ecological-design center. (As Gov. Jerry Brown's "state architect," Farallones founder Sim Van der Ryn would soon craft pioneering state energy standards and the nation's first energy-efficiency program for government offices.)

With a zero advertising budget, referrals to Sun Light & Power came through Butt's company or word-of-mouth. A $5,000 loan from Gerber's uncle served as the company's "little pot of operating capital" for five years. "I really didn't know how I was going to make the next payroll, and then a check would arrive," Gerber said.

A key to sustaining him was cheese, which he sold from his silver Volkswagen 411 to delis, restaurants and the co-op in Quincy where his sister lived in a tepee.

Federal and state tax credits eventually boosted business -- and in 1979, President Carter mounted 34 solar collectors on the White House roof to power the West Wing's water heater. In 1980, Gerber sold the mobile cheese business and go full time on solar.

But then President Reagan moved in and the White House collectors came down. The tax credits disappeared in the mid-1980s and the industry plunged "over a cliff," Gerber recalled.
The company survived by building sunrooms and servicing water heaters installed in the earlier days. The salary of his wife, Barbara Gerber, executive assistant to the University of California's academic vice president, helped support his dream. "Every time I said, 'You know, honey, we have to make a little loan -- or a big loan -- to my company,' she's been there,' " he said. "She recognizes it's what I live for."

THEN in 1991, the phone rang. It was Terry Galloway, a wealthy chemical engineer and early solar devotee whose home had turned to ash in the Oakland Hills' devastating firestorm.
Galloway wanted to rebuild bigger and better -- photovoltaic panels, solar water heating systems for house and pool, and passive features. The massive project was cutting-edge: To computerize it, Galloway had to write 250 pages of code himself.

Gerber's was one of only three listings under Solar Energy in the Yellow Pages. Galloway laid out his proposition. "It was very, very quiet on the other end of the line," Galloway recalled.
The venture gave Gerber a blank canvas on which to experiment.

The house, the subject of a book by Galloway with a foreword by Gerber, contained features nearly unheard of at the time: a ground source heat pump, which tapped solar energy collected by the earth; a passive nighttime cooling system that drew in night air through louvers and vents and recirculated it by day; and the computerized code that choreographed it all.

Though solar electricity was nascent, Gerber learned as he went, installing the photovoltaic roof panels in part with training from a wholesale supplier.

"There wasn't anything off the shelf to buy, so we had to just invent it," Gerber recalled. "Most of what I did was I threw out crazy ideas, and Terry just kept on saying yes."

In 1998, industry activists successfully fought to institute cash rebates for grid-linked systems -- part of a California Energy Commission program to promote renewable power. Fears over Y2K gave the industry another boost, as people concerned that the grid would collapse sought self-sufficiency. Four years of state tax credits followed, beginning in 2002. (Those expired last year, but a tripling of the federal tax credit filled the gap.)

The financial measures, combined with concerns about global warming and a dwindling oil supply, have stirred keen consumer interest.

"It was huge," Gerber said of the government incentives, which have fueled the bulk of business growth. "Not only is it 'free money,' which everybody likes, it lent credibility to the industry."
Market researchers project a quintupling of the clean-technology industry by 2015 -- to $51 billion. Gerber is working at capacity, installing as many photovoltaic panels each month as he can obtain from Mitsubishi -- which only entered the California market in 2005. Nationwide demand in 2006 outpaced the available supply of polysilicon, the refined silicon crystal wafers used to make the cells, though shortages seem to have been alleviated in the last few months.

Build It Green is working with more than 70 public agencies across California that either have developed or are developing green building policies -- up from only two in 2003. The group's certification training sessions for engineers and architects used to draw about two dozen. They now sell out at 100 and more have been added. The group "green-certified" 600 building professionals in the last three years, but expects to certify 600 more this year alone. As Gerber's company booms with the times, he has redoubled his effort to leave no eco-footprint. On this score, he has a zeal that Gitt and others have called unparalleled, even in an industry of idealists.

There's his fleet of trucks that run on bio-diesel -- which a hired chemist cooked in the company garage for a time, but which Gerber now buys from a local company. There's the all-wool carpet (a renewable resource that doesn't emit harmful gases, as synthetics do), the special wall paint (low in volatile organic compounds) and Gerber's personal electric car, charged from the solar-power system that's bolted to the roof of his rented office.

THE conference room and table are built from reused sunroom glass, and every other piece of furniture -- including the red faux-Roman pillar in the middle of the room -- is a hand-me-down or salvage job.

Bustling through the space are dozens of bike-riding, recycling, green-loving workers selected not for their technical skills -- those came later -- but for their commitment to the cause. (One noted in his application essay that he had reused the same shampoo and conditioner bottles for 12 years.)

The pay is good enough that some of his employees are buying homes -- a fact that makes Gerber's eyes well with tears. These days, it seems, his enthusiasm regularly meets its match outside the confines of the office.

Company employees recently went on a group outing in Oakland to see "Who Killed the Electric Car?," the documentary on the politics behind General Motors' decision to pull the plug on its production electric vehicle. At evening's end, Gerber fetched his own electric car, and when he pulled up to the curb he was startled by applause.

Marveled the former struggling cheese salesman: "I got a standing O."

leora.romney@latimes.com