My introduction to what we now call “solar power” came in a college classroom in the 1970s. A student brought in a gizmo he was helping develop at a Santa Rosa, Calif., company.
The thin, 1-by-3-inch glass box had two wires connected to a small light bulb. When he exposed the box to sunlight, the bulb lit up. Voila! I still remember intense, solar-generated buzz in the class afterwards.
A few years later, I visited a fellow who lived off the grid. The roof of his hilltop house featured a tower capped with an industrial-looking cylinder with a large spinning propeller. He called the apparatus Wally the Wind Generator. Wally produced juice to charge a half-dozen rows of automotive batteries in the basement of his house. Collectively, there was enough electricity to run lights and some household…
