He's still following the sun
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 installa-tions 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.
