Solar Panels

My cabin in the Oregon woods for most of the 1980s

My one room shack, built on a forested hillside, was a ten minute's hike up from the nearest road, telephone, mailbox, and power line. I hauled my water five gallons at a time, and chopped firewood all winter. But the nights were long and dark, and reading by candle light is not recommended. The year was 1983. And I was a hippy who had browsed the Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News attentively. I knew that my situation had a simple resolution. I just needed to deploy a photovoltaic solar panel. 

This simple device is made from a number of wafers of silicon wired together. That's all it is, really - aside from a protective frame. It converts sunlight to electricity. Combine this with a battery to store the energy gathered during the day, to have energy to use at night. 

The conversion of light to electrical energy - known as the photovoltaic effect - had first been observed by Alexandre Becquerel in 1839. But it was not until the 1950s that devices were built by Bell Laboratories to make use of the phenomenon: solar panels to power some of the earliest satellites launched to space. Gradually, solar cells made their way into the marketplace, sold typically as science novelties for children and hobbyists. By the 1970s, the most ubiquitous use of photovoltaics available to consumers was the solar powered calculator. However, in specialized niche markets, full scale power module solar panels were starting to appear by then. They were expensive, but useful for mobile and remote power needs.

Pres. Jimmy Carter installed solar water heating panels on the White House roof in 1979

In the late 60s and early 70s, Stewart Brand, hippy philosopher and itinerant peddler of tools, took note of solar panels and included them in his publication, The Whole Earth Catalog. And now the multitudes of his hippy readers knew where to get their hands on arrays of solar panels sufficient for powering a home, or a rock concert. 

I was lucky to find a local dealer of solar equipment, who happened to have a slightly used demo model that he sold me for half price - a bargain in 1983, for only $150. I built a mount on my cabin roof, bought an RV battery, wired it all up to my car stereo and a couple of light bulbs, and suddenly found myself civilized - with reading lights and nice music out in the middle of nowhere. 

I still have my solar panel, and it still works fine, 34 years later. Though I am currently only using it as a coffee table. But it's just nice knowing that, when the proverbial shit hits the fan, I can still crank up the tunes!

My old PV solar panel, now used as a coffee table

But aside from being useful for my own odd lifestyle choice in the 80s, solar power is an important answer for some of humanity's most pressing problems - especially when combined with other renewable sources of energy, and electrified transportation. Reliance on fossil fuel causes pollution, climate change, and international strife. The oil and coal corporations have a vested interest in maintaining our reliance on their products, and have suppressed the development of alternative energy with their propaganda and price manipulation.

Great inventions do not always catch on right away. Some never do. Others get caught up in buy-outs, or legal disputes, and languish in patent limbo. In the case of photovoltaic solar panels, a bit of misdirection and market manipulation has been sufficient to suppress this marvelous yet simple technology, which could be solving several global problems simultaneously right now. And to be frank, it could have started doing so as early as the 1970s, if only consumers had listened to the hippies instead of the petroleum corporations. We could have avoided several wars in the Middle East, averted global warming before it was too late, prevented hundreds of oil spill disasters such as the Exxon Valdez and the BP Deepwater Horizon, and a number of economic recessions might not have hit so hard, if we could have been more serious about green energy way back when it was first proposed.

Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, April 2010

While hippies did not invent the photovoltaic solar panel, and indeed most could not even afford to buy one, they certainly embraced and promoted the concept. The hippies deserve credit for recognizing solar energy's potential to solve major problems. The government and the marketplace were remiss in not heeding the foresight of those deep thinker hippies.

In fact, this gets at the central theme of my blog here. Again and again, we will find hippie wisdom lighting up the darkness and despair, only to be marginalized, scoffed at, swept under the rug, and snuffed out by mainstream society and its corporate puppeteers. But hippies are a humble lot, and would rather keep a positive attitude than hold a grudge. So I've decided that somebody needs to stand up and say "told you so!" I am here to point out all the times the hippies were right without being heard, and all the different ways they changed society without getting credit for it. In the case of solar panels, humanity lost about 40 years of crucial time by dismissing solar power as a hippy science fiction dream.

And now that we actually have futuristic monster hurricanes, rising sea levels, melted ice caps, coral reef bleaching, weird plant and animal migrations, record setting sweltering summers year after year, and politicians pretending like it's not happening, guess what? Solar panels are now so efficient and plentiful that solar energy costs less than fossil energy for the first time in history. There are now entire cities and countries running on 100% alternative energy. It may be too little, too late to prevent climate catastrophe. But solar is real. And cost effective. Not just for little cabins in the woods, but for nations and planets.