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Aaron talks with Jeff Spies and Jason Vetterli, seasoned solar industry veterans and filmmakers who are about to release the documentary Solar Roots.
They’ve spent nearly 10 years filming and editing this documentary to capture the wild, off-grid stories of the pioneers who built the foundation of the modern clean energy boom.
You can check out the documentary and watch party here.
Listen to this episode here, or on:
Expect to learn:
How the modern solar industry was built by back-to-the-land, herb-growin’ hippies in Northern California.
Why these barefoot farmers could afford solar at $50/Watt (it’s hilarious).
When and where the Solar Roots watch party will be (and if you’re invited).
Quotes from the episode:
“The hippies started the PV industry. I really was curious to understand, was that true? And that was the basic premise of the film... at the end of the film, we take this story and I think we answered the question.”
— Jeff Spies“The vast majority of energy on this planet 200 years from now will be generated from the sun. It’s just it’s just that simple... Sand is an incredibly, incredibly abundant resource. We’re not running out of that.”
— Jason Vetterli
Transcript:
Aaron Nichols Hello everyone and welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. And today I have Jeff Spies and Jason Vetterli here to talk about their upcoming film, Solar Roots. If you guys wouldn’t mind introducing yourselves, talking about who you are in the industry, and then talking a little bit about the film.
Jeff Spies My name’s Jeff Spies. I don’t know if you want to start over.
Aaron Nichols Okay.
All right. And did I get yours right, Jason? Okay. Hello, everyone. And hello, everyone. And welcome back to This Week at Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. And today I have Jeff Spies and Jason Vetterlion, who have filmed and are about to release a film called Solar Roots.
Jason Vetterli You nailed it, yeah.
Jeff Spies This one’s easy.
Aaron Nichols Now, I’m very excited for this because I love wild, off-grid people, ⁓ and I have for a long time. So, Jeff and Jason, if you guys wouldn’t mind just introducing yourselves and talking a little bit about who you are in the industry and then what started this process, how did this film come about?
Jeff Spies My name is Jeff Spees and I am the president of Planet PlanSets. We’re a solar plan drafting company working nationwide for solar and storage contractors. And Jason and I worked together years ago at Quick Mount PV. We started one day apart from one another and became good friends early on. And I roped him into helping me make this documentary film, which started because we had a party called the Solar Pioneer Party, where we got together a lot of the original
really influential ⁓ movers and shakers in the early years of the solar PV industry, just as a fun get together. And that turned into a second Solar Pioneer Party and that turned into a third. And in the process, Jason and I had this idea to make a documentary film to capture these stories before these people were no longer around. And I’m glad that we did because several unfortunately have already passed away and ⁓ we were successful at capturing.
some really amazing stories, but it wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for Jason’s talents as a filmmaker and editor to make this story come to life.
Jason Vetterli ⁓ kind of got an intro there already, but my name is Jason Betterly. I work, ⁓ in the, racking space, ⁓ residential and commercial for, ⁓ quite some time in this industry, 15 years, maybe not that much time when you consider, ⁓ who we’re talking about in our documentary. ⁓ but yes, had a, a modicum of, ⁓ video, ⁓
and editing experience in my past and ⁓ so got roped into what was supposed to be a little 20 minute project and here we are ⁓ almost 10 years later trying to finally release ⁓ this film that we’re both proud of, really comes from the heart, really tells some amazing stories. So happy to be here.
Aaron Nichols I love
how y’all started that process. It reminds me when my best friend, when I had just turned 18, asked me in high school gym class if I wanted to go skydiving. And that’s how I ended up going skydiving the first time. As I mentioned in the intro, I love wild, off-grid people. And I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to 30 countries. I spent four and a half years out of the country in my 20s, just going to as many places as I could. And one thing that I have always been blown away
by is the hardiness of people who choose to live a different way. And that’s one reason I got so excited when I heard about this project is because there’s so many people in this film who years and years ago decided to live off the land and just opt out of society and use solar energy for that. So if y’all wouldn’t mind just giving a bit of an intro about the cast of characters and some of the stories that people can expect to hear in the film.
Jeff Spies I describe it as the who’s who of who made this technology into an industry. And I differentiate the start of the technology from the start of the industry in that, you know, photovoltaic or photogalvanic effect was discovered in middle of 1800s by Edmund Becquerel in France. And then you had the discovery that selenium, you know, had photovoltaic properties in the later 1800s and the first selenium solar modules were the late 1800s. And then Albert Einstein explained the photovoltaic
photovoltaic effect in the ⁓ early 1900s won the Nobel Peace Prize for that work. But it wasn’t until the 50s that Bell came out with a practical silicon solar battery that was so expensive it could only be afforded by the government for, you know, satellites. And so what we saw was, as we were interviewing these pioneers of the industry, is there was a progression where
The technology moved from space into what was termed terrestrial PV, mostly remote mountaintop telecommunication sites. Sometimes railroads would have telecom sites in these remote areas. And it was there where the transition took place from these very expensive mountaintop solar photovoltaic systems, power and telecom, into people’s homes. And that’s where I felt...
where the industry was born is when these solar panels started to get brought into regular people’s homes to power lights and music. That was the start of the PV industry. And the question we asked at the beginning of the film is because when I first started in PV, I was told and I distinctly remember the story that David Katz told me as we were walking through the streets of San Francisco at the 2007 NECA show. And he told me how he got into PV. And I was like, this is a frigging great story. And ⁓
And it really just, what I heard over and over again from those folks that I started working with when I worked at AE Solar was that the hippies started the PV industry. And I really was curious to understand, was that true? And that was the basic premise of the film is, you know, did the hippies start the PV industry? And ⁓ at the end of the film, we take this story and I think we answered the question because it really got into defining what is a hippie.
And so we interviewed in 50, I think we had 45 interviews where we interviewed, or maybe it was 55 interviews where we interviewed 45 people, some people we interviewed more than once. And, you know, over those interviews, we got a very diverse group of perspectives from the really significant individuals that made this technology into a viable industry.
Aaron Nichols Nice.
Jeff Spies And ⁓ my favorite story really was when the oil industry was making these modules behind me. That was made by an oil company, Arcosolar, this module here. It was the 162000 module, was one of the early famous modules for the home power boom of solar. And when the sales representatives for Arcosolar started traveling around trying to figure out why these solar panels were being sold into these remote off-grid places in Northern California,
Aaron Nichols Wow.
Jeff Spies They walked into David Katz’s business in Brysling, California and saw these dirty hippies walking through the door with fistfuls of cash to buy super expensive modules. And they were blown away that these modules that they couldn’t find a practical market for were being bought by hippies with cash that smelled like marijuana. That’s the story right there. was the moment.
where in my opinion I consider the PV industry was born that day.
Jason Vetterli So when I got into this, I was told, let’s go up to Humboldt County and have a party with all these quote unquote hippies that started the industry. ⁓ What I quickly found out though was, yes, first of all, we go into a bit of detail at the end of the movie ⁓ pointing out how complicated the definition of a hippie actually is. ⁓ What I quickly found out
was that my preconceived notions of a hippie as probably being somebody that had tuned out a society and was maybe really into music, and nature and like organic foods doesn’t really cover the full scope of, of who these people were, or doesn’t even remotely cover who these people were. For the most part, ⁓ we talk a lot about the back to the land movement, which was a, a thing that was coming out of the colleges.
in the early seventies where after the, ⁓ the kind of consciousness revolution in the sixties and all the stuff that was going on in the late sixties, ⁓ the next step for a lot of kind of deep thinkers and progressive minded folks was like, well, maybe we should go try to make this a reality. for a lot of them, that meant getting out of the cities, ⁓ to the degree of even getting off the grid and kind of building their own kind of
hopefully utopian ways of life. And you know, these things went in all directions. ⁓ Some of them were successful, some of them were not. But many of the folks that ended up starting the businesses that were kind of precursors to the big home power industry that we see today ⁓ were subscribers to this Back to the Land.
ideology for sure, but they were also, ⁓ many of them were scientists and or, or they had, or they had developed their own, ⁓ understanding of, ⁓ of kind of science and do it all by doing it yourself. You know, you’re out there, you have to learn to farm, you have to learn, ⁓ how to, and they were using electricity out here before they had the solar.
and we should talk about that, but it was in, it was in very rudimentary ways with car batteries and, and that’s a huge part of how this started.
Jeff Spies driving your car around every day, driving the car to charge
your house battery.
Aaron Nichols Ha ha!
Jason Vetterli There was
a point in there somewhere I was trying to get to. It’s that these people are, these people were so much more than hippies to me after I met them and had the fortune to stay at many of their homes and witness what they had done over the years. It’s interesting because a lot of these folks were older than me and kind of coming into the sunset. I don’t know if I should say that, but you know,
they had lived full lives. And it’s interesting to see what they had done, what they had built, an off-grid home looks like after being lived in for sometimes up to 40 years, know, 30, 40 years. So yeah, this was a, I learned so much about this off-grid. I wish I was an off-grid. You said you love.
Aaron Nichols Wow.
Jason Vetterli stories about people tramping around through the backwoods. That’s not me, but I feel very fortunate that I was able to leave Oakland, California, where I’m sitting right now and experience some of this very eye-opening and very beautiful people, man.
Aaron Nichols Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I’m sure. And you mentioned the nuance and the challenging of that definition. That’s been one of my favorite things that I’ve experienced through traveling the world is just the endless nuance you discover in people that you thought were one dimensional that you wrote off because your brain didn’t have space once you go meet them. That’s probably one of the best things that travel can give you. I’m interested in... ⁓
Jason Vetterli Absolutely.
Aaron Nichols I’m interested in music because you both mentioned music as being a big part of this story and people using solar power to make sure they had music in these off-grid places. I would love to go down that rabbit hole with you guys.
Jeff Spies Well, here’s the thing. could get, you know, so these folks that were living in these remote areas, and there were three hot spots of the early development of the industry, Northern Mendocino County, Southern Humboldt County, and Grass Valley, California. And I’ve really thought long and hard for years about why these particular locations. I have my theories on that. But in these backwoods locations, you had dirt friggin’ roads.
You didn’t have TV or radio stations that could even get a signal back in that area. You had to chop your own wood for your own heat to burn in a wood stove. You had no refrigeration, no electricity. Lighting was done with kerosene lanterns. It was very primitive by modern standards. And the interesting thing is you could get lighting with kerosene lanterns.
but you had no way of listening to music in these backwards locations without electricity. And ⁓ unless you had your own instruments, and that certainly was popular for folks that knew how to play a guitar or whatever the case may be. But most people had that desire to listen to music. For goodness sakes, it was the 70s. And obviously, many people that kind of think about hippies think about hippies and rock and roll music. And that was a big driving motivation for people to want to have electricity. And what they did, as you would imagine, is pretty obvious. They had a
They had an ⁓ eight track tape, this is before cassettes, an eight track tape deck in their car. And they would say, well, let me just take the speakers from my car in the house. Why don’t I take the stereo in the house? And why don’t I just plug it into the battery in my car and I can listen to music in the house? And what that grew into was people that were looking to install a second battery just for home power in their car. And indeed David Katz, who was the founder of AEE Solar, my first employer in the PV industry, he
was an auto repairman. He actually was an electrical engineer, worked for the Department of Defense. And then he moved to Humboldt County and couldn’t make a living as an electrical engineer. And he went back into his business of fixing Volkswagen Beetles and eventually started to realize that he could help people convert their cars to a two battery charging system so that when they got done driving, they’d drive up to their house, plug the house into the car battery, and now they’d have power for music. And that was life changing for these people who lived in the back country.
It made life so much more fun and enjoyable to bring music into these back country locations and lighting. So it was music and lights, music and lights. We hear that over and over again. Some people think, well, these hippies were using solar power to power grow lights for marijuana. No, no, no. That’s insane. Yeah, they didn’t do that. They, well, they grew marijuana outdoors.
Jason Vetterli That’s the biggest misconception.
Aaron Nichols Well, you probably didn’t even need them.
Jason Vetterli No, you’re growing them outside
up there and these big, you clear some forests and you plant a bunch of plants and the sun does all the work. It’s really the same thing with solar, I guess, but they were, they were using, they were rationing and being very, ⁓ ecological about this whole approach because they had very little power. This whole charge the battery. How often are they even driving to town? Some of them. ⁓ but when they would be able to charge a battery through a car or.
perhaps not too long after that folks were looking at this battery model and going, maybe I can hook up a windmill or, or, or a micro hydro system to a stream. If you were fortunate to have water and that water was running at certain times of the year, you could, you could net a little bit of, of stored energy in that battery. you know, also battery technology wasn’t where it’s at today. And, ⁓ so it was the same back to the land mentality of, ⁓ of, ⁓
of doing much, much more with very, very little. ⁓ so yeah, they had, they had to find the right type of early led lights that would not, that would not use that much energy and, and, a radio was not going to take too much, but they had to be very, they had to conserve their, little power they had, but they learned to live like this. And, ⁓ so by the time this kind of, they started smelling this, ⁓ solar
Option in the air. It was like they already had the system set up. They already had the the home electrification model set up They just didn’t have a way to really supercharge it until Until a few folks started sticking these solar panels very expensive solar panels on their homes and then man, it was like a wildfire at that point and You you had to be able to afford it. I don’t know if you want to speak a little bit on that Jeff
Jeff Spies Well, yeah, just to give some perspective, today you can buy solar panels depending on where you’re at in the world for as little as maybe 10 or 15 cent a watt. Here in the US, maybe it’s going to be more like 50 cent a watt. If you look at the money they paid back in, let’s say, 1980 when this really started to take form, people were paying at that time about $13 to $14 a watt. In 1980 dollars, when you adjust for inflation, it’s like $50 a watt today. And these were...
Barefoot hippies that were buying the most expensive form of electrical power generation that probably existed up until that time outside of like building nuclear reactor and and and they were and the reason that they bought these solar panels was interesting because at At $50 watt adjusted for inflation today It was still cheaper than driving your car around all the time to charge your home battery So solar was bought back then because it was cheaper
Aaron Nichols Well, just really
for some context as well, I know that we love to talk about price per watt. There’s a decent amount of people who listen to this who are past customers of Exact Solar who don’t think of things in price per watt. They’re not in the industry. So let’s just say for context like that panel behind you, if we’re talking about $13 a watt, like how much would that have been?
Jeff Spies So just to do the math, that’s a 33 watt module. It’s a ARCO 162000 from Atlantic Bridgefield. So was 33 watts times... It was about $14 a watt. That would be $462 in 1980. And adjusted for inflation today, I could go to the Consumer Price Index Calculator and run that. But effectively, it’s about 100 times more expensive.
Aaron Nichols Okay.
Jeff Spies ⁓ So it was an incredibly expensive way to generate electricity, but it was still cheaper than driving your car all the time to charge your car battery.
Aaron Nichols Nice.
Jason Vetterli These
back to the land folks had a network of communication before the internet that was basically printed publication based. You have the whole earth catalog, you had a mother earth magazine, and then you had magazines that were starting to come out that were specifically. ⁓
being built around this new kind of off-grid home power, like the magazine Home Power, for example. ⁓ And so everyone that was out here living off-grid was already kind of in the loop with these publications because they’d go in the store to buy their chicken wire and their kerosene and their water, everything you need to live off-grid and that publication would be sitting right there on the counter. So it wasn’t long before ⁓ when I said it spread like wildfire, it really happened.
very quickly and then it just became how are we going to afford it? ⁓ When we talked to some of these, one of our Arco sales guys that Jeff mentioned who had gone up to Humboldt and seen these people paying for modules and cash, he noted that it was often around harvest time ⁓ when a homeowner would buy their
an off-grid homeowner would buy their first module because maybe they were growing some plants in their backyard and maybe they did just come up on a handful of cash ⁓ at the beginning of November because they had maybe sold these plants. So ⁓ that was a key ⁓ mechanism in allowing this very expensive ⁓
Aaron Nichols you
Jason Vetterli technology to be purchased by just the right people who knew what to do with that technology. mean, ARCO had been selling this stuff, as we spoke on to the railroads to, it was going to their own oil rigs. ⁓ ARCO used to dry fly a helicopter out with a giant battery to the oil rigs. think it was like every two months and they pushed the old battery into the ocean. I mean, I don’t want to slam the oil companies too hard, but that’s what they do. They just dump that one in.
Jeff Spies Yep.
There was a big pile of lead acid batteries at the bottom of all of these marker buoys.
Jason Vetterli and then drop and land a new one. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. And then they drop a new battery. so they, they pretty quickly figured out, this technology that we’re having trouble selling, ⁓ we could be using on our, on our own oil rigs, but it, was the industrial complex that was, you know, the industrial complex has a lot of, a lot of capital. And so they could find these remote applications for it. But, ⁓ it was when the power, when it got in the hands of some very clever.
people that wanted to change the world is really when home power was born. And that’s another real semantic, ⁓ kind of thing here too. We talked about that, the hippies, the industry, what’s the industry and, and what is the home power industry? ⁓ but the home power industry has certainly grown to influence the entire commercial and, and utility scale industry. They’ve all cross pollinated for sure.
Jeff Spies Yeah,
my opinion that if it weren’t for this technology get into the hands of regular people and homes scattered in these remote communities, our technology would have been much further behind because it was those individuals that convinced people in the commercial business world and in the utility sector, this technology actually worked. It was expensive admittedly, but there was that belief that as time went on and as we’ve seen, the price would come down. And now
Jason Vetterli Absolutely.
Jeff Spies Solar kilowatt hours are the cheapest kilowatt hours that you can make, which makes me feel really good.
Aaron Nichols Yeah, I also, one of the coolest things I noted in the trailer was that a lot of these systems that these people installed are still producing electricity and it’s been like 45 years or something like that.
Jeff Spies Yep.
Yep. That module right there is a workhorse. I know people that have had module like this that are 40 years old and they’re still producing over 90 % of the rated power.
Aaron Nichols That’s so cool.
Jason Vetterli That’s the amazing part about it.
Jeff Spies Now, these
modules were bulletproof. Not bulletproof, but these had thick cells, thick glass. You can see the glass wasn’t that big. They were really high quality manufacturing components. Obviously, there’s a lot of modules today that are junk and have really thin glass and thin cells that microcrack all the time. And there’s a whole bunch of quality problems. But these old ARCO 162000s were
Aaron Nichols You
Jason Vetterli Yeah,
these were made to last, dude. These are the great generation.
Aaron Nichols Yeah.
Jeff Spies incredible modules. Plain and simple, the most iconic module from those early years in my opinion.
Jason Vetterli But even with the new modules, mean, I forget who it was. Someone in our documentary said, there’s no moving parts. mean, unless you’re talking about a tracker system, but there’s no moving parts. It doesn’t need to be oiled. There’s no gears that are going to break down. They said it so beautifully in the movie. God, who was it? It might’ve been Mark Morose. He said, really? It’s just glass molded in such a way. mean, what’s the silicon wafer made out of? It’s glass molded in such a way.
Aaron Nichols Yeah.
Jason Vetterli that it captures the sun and, you know, most solar panels are up high on a roof or unless we start experiencing tremendous like meteor storms, I think a lot of these panels are still gonna have a long lifetime. ⁓ So anything that’s really gonna take it out is a rock flying from space, maybe a missile, but.
Aaron Nichols Yeah.
Yeah, I joke about this all the time, Jason, the no moving parts thing. mean, it’s I think like the the uphill battle we have to fight in solar is that it’s it’s so good at what it does that it’s boring. It just lays there and makes power. Yeah.
Jason Vetterli Mm. Sure, yeah.
Jeff Spies It’s magic to me. If you understood
that that flat piece of black glass that’s sitting motionless in the sun is generates pumping on electricity. How does that happen? It’s amazing to me. And I’ll just say, Aaron, the favorite part of the film, and it always will be for me, is the last 15 minutes. And I don’t want to give it away. I think that you need to experience it firsthand. we
I think, address the human part of our story, because we certainly talk about the technology, but in a way that I don’t find boring. I think it’s interesting. But the end of our story, we’re talking about, we’re answering the question of did the hippies start the solar industry and really had the opportunity to get just some heartfelt commentary from our main characters that was beautiful.
Makes me choke up when I think about how beautiful it is, what they said, what we were able to capture and the message that we can deliver to the world about the importance of this technology and the importance of sustainability, which I consider crosses a lot of boundaries, but sustainability at its core means that we are able to keep life healthy and moving on this earth and not, you know, essentially cut our own throats. It’s like the goose that laid the golden egg.
You want that goose to keep laying golden eggs over time. You don’t want to kill the goose to get the eggs in their side because they’re not there.
Aaron Nichols Yeah.
Jason Vetterli If you got people that think the technology is boring, not to put on my marketing hat here, ⁓ just tell them to come watch our movie. Or they don’t, we’re going to give it to them for free anyway, so just tell them to type in the URL.
Jeff Spies Yeah.
Aaron Nichols Amazing.
Jeff Spies It’s a people story. It’s
a people story is what it is. It is a documentary and it is a technology, but at its core, what makes it good is that it’s a human interest story with really fascinating, smart people who you can feel what they’re like through the movie. And I’m so happy we were able to capture that because...
Jason Vetterli Absolutely.
Jeff Spies I was fortunate when I came into the industry and I didn’t get started early. I had my first job in solar in the 80s, but I did not get into PV until the mid 2000s. And when I came in, I was fortunate to meet these amazing people. And my one of the great accomplishments in my life is I was immersed in a community of the most amazing people I’ve ever known in my life. The smartest, most visionary, compassionate, and, ⁓ you know, socially out.
They’re looking out for the benefits of the world as a whole. And so to be surrounded by those people and to work with them for so many years and then to help tell their story, it’s true privilege. I think Jason and I have been given to help make sure that this story continues on for future generations to know and for folks that don’t work in the industry that need to be ⁓ inspired to embrace a life of sustainability. That’s my goal.
Jason Vetterli Yeah,
I’d like,
Aaron Nichols Well, I’m very excited to watch it. I mean, so I ask everyone who comes on the show the same closing question. And I think you guys are pretty well poised to answer it after these experiences and the people that you’ve worked with and met through this project. But last year, I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party.
And when I was reflecting on that afterwards, I realized that 80 years meant she was born into a world where what we call solar PV or even home PV didn’t exist nearly in the same way that we think about it now. Like we knew about the photovoltaic effect, but we didn’t have commercial cells. Everything that’s happened, all of what you guys have mentioned, have happened in the last 80 years, all the way down to solar becoming the cheapest power source.
and the exponential growth curve we’re on now and the interesting story we’re living through with the transition to more solar. So if you guys were to just moonshot having talked to these people who were there on the front lines, where do you think clean energy is going? What do you think energy looks like 80 years from now?
Jason Vetterli I start with that. mean, I’ll just lift a quote from ⁓ someone in the movie that he said ⁓ he doesn’t care what the politics is. He doesn’t care for being, you know, being whoever’s running this planet and whether people are happy or not. One thing we know for sure is that the vast majority of of energy on this planet 200 years from now will be generated from the sun. It’s just it’s just that simple.
Aaron Nichols you
Jason Vetterli Sand is an incredibly, incredibly abundant resource. We’re not running out of that. And it’s just so fast to deploy and so easy to deploy. And as you spoke on the price, the price is just right. I don’t really see anything stopping it from doing exactly that.
Jeff Spies Well, the way I’ll answer that question is, first of all, it’s all nuclear energy. The sun is nuclear energy. It’s just that we have that reactor sufficiently far away from Earth to not make it as dangerous as it would be if it was here on Earth. But keep in mind that all energy that we have in this planet outside of nuclear power reactors is solar energy. Oil, coal, natural gas, that’s all embodied energy from the sun. It’s just that fossil fuels are very inefficient, dirty form.
of capturing the energy of the sun. And when you can just take a flat piece of glass and aim it at the sun and get kilowatt hours without all of the horrible environmental consequences that come from fossil fuels, that’s magic. And so the future I’ve thought of in the, if we looked at how many years did you want me to predict? 100 years into the future? 80? I’ll start with it. I think that, you know, certainly solar PV is going to be a massive
Aaron Nichols 80, 80 years.
Jason Vetterli I
went 200, sorry man.
Jeff Spies component of the worldwide power grid in 80 years. That’s my opinion. I think that we may very well see ⁓ nuclear power reactors come back if fusion reactors can be made safe and reliable. But I think that it would be a blend of fusion nuclear reactors and PV where PV can be deployed anywhere. But fusion nuclear reactors you don’t want next to a earthquake zone on the ocean, Fukushima, if you know what I’m talking about. So
Effectively, think that solar PV is here to stay. think it’s going to power the world for many decades to come. And I think that the question is probably more one of resources, because while we can generate more more electricity with solar power, there still is an environmental impact to mining all the materials necessary to make the solar modules. I feel that, yes, storage and realistically, we have to, I think,
Jason Vetterli storage.
Jeff Spies embrace the concept that you should not. You can, but you should not extract more from the world around you than you put back into it. This is a fundamental tenet of farming and gardening that any farmer knows is that if you don’t invest back into your land, it gets depleted. And I think that while we can generate more and more electricity, the question is how do we do that in a way that doesn’t extract the resources from the environment
in a way that we can’t invest back into the environment. So I hope people, when they see our film, start to think a little bit more high level about their impact on the earth around them and trying to make sure that they’re putting back at least what they’re taking out. I would like to think that people that come and see this film and get inspired to do good with their life will try to put more back into their environment than they take out. That to me is a successful way.
Aaron Nichols Well, guys, where do you like to be found online or otherwise if you do like to be found? And where can people find the film when it’s ready?
Jeff Spies ⁓ Well, the
Jason Vetterli I don’t
like to be found. I’ll go first. don’t really like to be found unless ⁓ I want you to find me and then you’d already know. But you can find me on LinkedIn, Jason Vetterli, ⁓ V is in Victor E-T-T-E-R-L-I. ⁓ That’s my kind of connection to the business side of things. So, yeah, if you know my Instagram, you do. I’m old, so all I use is Instagram. ⁓ But yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at.
Aaron Nichols Okay.
Jeff Spies Yep.
Aaron Nichols Great.
Nice.
Jeff Spies Yeah, I think.
Jason Vetterli Come to
our party and you can find me in person. ⁓ We should give a plug to that. We will be having a, all the details may be better left to ⁓ Jeffrey here. ⁓ Halloween.
Aaron Nichols Yeah. When and where.
Jeff Spies Yeah, I was just going to have
a website set up for it. It’s solar-roots.com. That’ll tell you about the documentary, about the party. That’s certainly a way you can connect with us to get your messages through. But I’m like Jason on LinkedIn, Jeff Spies, spelled like Spies, S-P-I-E-S. And I’m on Facebook too, but I probably am more active now on LinkedIn. And of course, my day job, which has taken up a lot of my time. Thankfully, we’re
continuing to stay busy even in an uncertain market and you know, I think this this coming year is going to be a active one as we make that transition into the what the industry will now be looking like with all the expiration of the residential tax credits.
Aaron Nichols So for everyone who’s listening, go to solar-roots.com. All the details you need to see the film will be there. And thank you for listening. That’s been This Week in Solar.
Jason Vetterli Thank you, Aaron.
Jeff Spies Thanks, Aaron.
Aaron Nichols Thanks, guys.
