Wise Talkers, Episode 2, Mar 22, 2024
Full Transcript, minor edits for clarity
Ron
Hello and welcome to Wise Talkers. I’m Ronald Fel Jones, host and producer of the podcast.
The theme of Wise Talkers is Actionable Wisdom for Turbulent Times, and I seek that wisdom in one on one conversations with thought leaders and change makers from a wide variety of backgrounds, and as we delve into their work and their ideas, we explore realistic ways to positively affect our lives, both individually and collectively, in these truly extraordinary times.
This is a brand new podcast. In fact, this is just the second edition of Wise Talkers. The first was published a few weeks ago, based around an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder that I conducted 45 years ago. In many ways, that inaugural edition of Wise Talkers sets the tone for everything to follow, so I hope you’ll check it out if you haven’t listened to it already.
You can get more information on the podcast, including all the episodes published, on our website, wisetalkers.com. We’re also on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, Google, etc.
Tonight’s guest is Jeff Spies, founder and CEO of a solar energy services company and a widely known technical expert and educator in the solar energy field. He’s also the co-producer of a wonderful film documenting the early days of the solar industry, and we’ll talk about all of that soon. I’ve titled this episode Jeff Spies: The Solar Dude Abides, and if you’ve seen the movie The Big Lebowski, you’ll understand why I chose that title, as Jeff talks about, among many other things, finding peace of mind in his life by becoming a Dudeist. And if you haven’t seen The Big Lebowski, well, I’ll explain the reference in the episode title at the end.
So my interview with Jeff will be coming right up. But first, since this is a brand new podcast, a couple of updates about Wise Talkers status and plans.
My initial idea was to publish a new Wise Talkers episode every week, and I still plan to get up to that frequency at some point, probably sometime this summer. But now that I’ve had some actual experience in all that it takes to get a podcast going, which is a lot more work than I naively thought it would be at the beginning, I realize that the pace is going to be a little slower here in the early going as we get up to speed. So for now, new full episodes will be published as they’re produced, which could be anywhere from a week apart to up to, say, three or four weeks apart.
And, as I said, you can always check the latest schedules on the website wisetalkers.com, and you can also comment on and join discussions about episodes there, and also subscribe to be notified whenever a new episode is published.
Okay, now a word about my four-part structure for conducting these interviews, which I’ve dubbed Ground… Focus… Fly… and Land. We’ll start in the Ground section with learning about the guests’ childhood, where they grew up, family situation, education and so on. Early life influences and interests, formative experiences and such.
Then we’ll switch to the Focus segment, where we’ll dive into the guests’ work and career, explore what they’re working on, what they’re passionate about.
Then on the Fly, where we broaden out to discuss some of the bigger issues that we all face in this turbulent world and look into what I have come to regard is the defining question of the Wise Talkers podcast, namely:
What do we need to do to make this a better world for all of us?
Now, that’s a broad question, to be sure, no simple answers, but it’s a question I believe we benefit by asking and conscientiously exploring. And it’s a topic that everybody has a stake in, obviously, and that we all have ideas about. We all have wisdom to share.
Then we’ll close in the Land segment. Summing it up, where are you now with your life and passions? What do you see ahead, both personally and globally? And I’ll ask my guests how they personally deal with the stresses and traumas in the world and in their own life.
Essentially, we’ll try to close with the theme of the Wise Talkers podcast. What actionable wisdom have we gained here– you and your life, and maybe even us here, in this interview.
This four-part structure is a general interviewing strategy, certainly not a script, and each conversation will naturally take its own course.
Okay, a final word about my interview with Jeff before, well, before listening to it. As I mentioned, Jeff and a friend and colleague of his, Jason Vetterli – actually a good friend of both Jeff and mine – and a very talented videographer – are in the final stages of producing a truly remarkable film that they’ve been working on since about 2015. It’s all about documenting the early days of the solar industry. The film is called Solar Roots, the Pioneers of PV and it’ll be released to free video-streaming. I believe they hope to get it out sometime later this year.
I wanted to add a little more about the film than we were able to talk about in our conversation last week, so I decided to rearrange things a bit here in the editing room and treat our discussion of the movie as an addendum to the main interview, so I could give it some more emphasis and some additional information, including how you can be informed about its release. So that will be coming right up after the main interview, which is coming up, well, right now.
—- music
Ron
My guest tonight is Jeff Spies. Jeff is the founder and CEO of a solar energy service company called Planet Plan Sets, which I’ll let Jeff describe himself here in just a moment.
Jeff and I are good friends, you should know that, and we’ve known each other for close to 20 years now. We met and got to know each other when we were both working in the solar industry. We both got to work for the same company, which we’ll probably talk about a bit. Those were really exciting days in the solar industry and in fact, we worked together at a couple of a different solar companies back in those days. So, without further ado, as they say, hello Jeff,
Jeff
Hey Ron, good to be here.
Ron
So, Jeff, let’s start at the beginning, just like you’re telling your life story from scratch. I believe you were born about, if I remember correctly, 1964, correct?
Jeff
Yeah, 1964, in Detroit, although my parents lived in Warren, Michigan
My childhood was tumultuous. My mother died when I was three years old, my sister and brother a year or two ahead of me, and it was a very difficult period of our lives that was highly unstable as a result of her death.
Ron
So you’re three or four when she died? That’s the age when we may or may not remember things, do you? I mean, you must have some memory of her being gone, but do you have any memory of her death?
Jeff
Well not of her death, but I do remember distinctly two things. One was she was tucking me into bed at night, and another one she was peeling apples in the kitchen, which is a nice memory.
Ron
These are your childhood memories of your mom…
Jeff
That’s correct. The age of awareness, for me at least, was before I was four, because she died when I was a couple months shy on my fourth birthday.
Ron
Gosh, that’s… well… where do you go from that? That’s a very painful thing, needless to say, to happen to anybody at any age, and as a child that young… I can’t even imagine it, Jeff. Must have been…
Jeff
You know, the funny thing is, you’re at that age where you don’t really know what normality is, so it’s not.…
Ron
Yeah, that’s a good point. Your memories of her death aren’t there, but the absence that you feel is … I don’t know, there’s no good time to lose your mother as a child. No way to finesse that.
Jeff
I’m sure it was. Her death was in itself problematic, but I think that the bigger problem was that my father was not a good person. And after a few years he met another woman who did not like us kids. It was a very unpleasant environment to live in and we were shipped off to boarding school. My brother and I went to military Catholic boarding school, so I started that in the first grade. I went to first grade through eighth grade to military Catholic boarding schools
Ron
Military Catholic school? Those are two terms I don’t normally hear together. I didn’t know there was such a thing as military Catholic boarding school.
Jeff
We lived at this school and were schooled by nuns. Some of them were really nice, some of them were horrible. Sister Anna May, who was like I think for me first grade, maybe first and second. She was a super sweet lady.
Then, fifth through ninth was a school much further away from my father’s house. But in weekends and the summertime I would be bouncing between relatives. My grandparents did watch me, my mother’s parents, a fair bit. When I was growing up my grandfather was just a wonderful, wonderful man, like my close, close friend, and it was good to have at least yeah.
Ron
I’ll say. Some family support.
Jeff
Yeah, with people that did care
Ron
So, just because I’m curious about this, what is the military part of the military Catholic boarding school?
Jeff
Well, it’s like being in boot camp, except you’re a little kid. You’re in school and you’re being treated like you’re in boot camp, where in the morning … boy, I’ll tell you I’ll never forget this… well, it doesn’t happen much anymore, but it happened through much my adult life, where I would hear reveille as soon as I’d wake up in the morning, because they used to have somebody blowing reveille on a bugle at whatever ungodly hour. They used to wake us up in the morning, every day for our entire school life. There were some weekends that we would go away from the school, but by and large you would hear that song over and over and over. So it gets like programmed into your brain to where you wake up and that’s the first thing your brain thinks, right?
Ron
Wow, so military…there’s nothing to do with actual US Military, I assume, just a form of martial education.
Jeff
I’ve never seen combat, unless you consider the nuns whacking me with a ruler, and they whacked you with other things, too. They were… some of them were cruel. And then, after eighth grade, we did move in with some other family members in Marine City, Michigan, and we completed our school there. So I went through my high school years in a small town in Marine City, which is on the St. Clair River that connects Lake Huron to Lake St Clair. So that river is very cold. If you try to swim in it you’re gonna freeze. Well, I don’t know about any more, but man back in those days even in the summer that river was cold all year round.
Ron
Global warming may have taken care of that for you.
Jeff
Yes, maybe. So… my mother died and, as I was growing up, we didn’t really discuss it. Quite honestly, life was difficult just because of the abusive environment we were living in with my father and his girlfriend. She had four kids of her own and she definitely did not like my father’s kids, obviously, so that I think that was part of the reason that she was so abusive towards us.
Ron
Even in the best of circumstances, step child and step parent relationships are difficult, but you’re saying she was beyond just the normal difficult.
Jeff
Oh yeah, she was. It was an unpleasant environment, to say the least. I remember there were times when she wouldn’t even allow us in the house. There was one summer that, after we got back from military Catholic boarding school, that I lived in the camper in the backyard the whole summer and was not allowed to go in the house, and that’s really strange. I think, is a lot of kids have to go through that, have really unfortunate circumstances. But it was certainly not a normal childhood.
Ron
Was it just you that was singled out, or all three of you?
Jeff
Well, I think all of us definitely were affected by this really negative environment and so no, I wasn’t singled out. But one thing I’ll say is I remember there was one incident where I was in the house and apparently I was little excited and running around and making noise and she whacked me in the face with a two-by-four, knocked me out.
Ron
With a two-by-four??
Jeff
Yeah. So I think that in this day, and age, if there was a recognition of what was happening, the legal implications would have been far different.
Ron
How old were you when that happened?
Jeff
Oh gee, I would have been pretty young still, somewhere around, I’m gonna guess third, fourth grade. Because after the fifth grade, thankfully, we were no longer allowed to come back to her house, which was awesome for me.
I was able to live with my grandparents in the offseason. They were really wonderful and thankfully we had a really really kind family. My brother was friends with his fellow named Paul Bernard in grade school. Paul unfortunately died when he’s 18 of a diabetic coma. Paul was type-one diabetic and insulin dependent.
But his aunt and uncle, who were his primary guardians, just took my brother and I into their home and treated us like parents. That lasted for, I don’t know, probably a couple years, and it was really wonderful having that kind of parental experience with two very caring people, Larry and Norma.
Ron
Well, one thing I would think is I just know from some issues in my own extended family, and kids growing up in a difficult environment for whatever reason, the parenting isn’t great. for one reason or another; they tend to think that’s the way the world is. We all grow up thinking our world is the world. And then if they get the opportunity to stay with other parents, other families who play the parenting role, one of the big advantages is just opening their eyes to the fact that, hey, the world doesn’t have to be that way I grew up all that time. There is such a thing as loving parents, good parents. Does that ring true at all for your experience here? I see you nodding your head there.
Jeff
Well, very much. Not only did I have this very positive experience with my grandparents, where my grandfather was like my father, really, and with Larry and Norma Mercurio, who were very kind, caring people, but I had that same experience with my Aunt Glennis, who unfortunately died about 15 years ago, and she was a wonderful woman who helped me hang in there and, yeah, keep my hopes alive.
Yeah, and then in high school, when I first left grade school in ninth grade, my brother and I moved up to Marine City and we lived with my mother’s cousin and her husband and their two sons, and and it was a difficult adjustment for me because it was the first time I’d really gone to a normal school, other than the first half of first grade and kindergarten. But, yeah, I was then immersed into kind of a bit more real-world environment that I wasn’t well prepared for, and it was a difficult period in my life.
And then I went to Michigan State University. I did well in school and I was able, through a combination of loans and scholarships, to be able to afford to go to Michigan State, which was in the early 80s, and it was, by today’s standards, very utilitarian. I just went back this past summer with a friend to look around campus and I was shocked at how fancy everything has become.
But I was able to go to school there and it was a state university, yeah it was a wonderful experience and it opened my eyes to the world and I had a chance to start trying to get my head screwed on straight after all of the difficult years growing up. So I think I made that transition into a different person in college. And it’s been a continual process ever since.
Ron
Why don’t we take being in college as a transition. What were you interested in school? Did you know what you wanted to be, so to speak, at any given age? What kind of things fascinated you as a kid? And then, what did you study in college?
Jeff
I had been inspired to become a veterinarian because I liked the book All Creatures, Great and Small. It’s a good book and I’m watching the PBS show. It’s been really good.
Ron
Yeah, I haven’t read it, but I know it’s widely lauded. So How long did you think that’s what you’d be, and when did you change your mind about that?
Jeff
I worked at the veterinary clinic in Michigan State University when I first started going to school there.
That was my first job and I worked my way through college by and large.
Ron
No kidding, I didn’t know that. That’s great.
Jeff
Yeah and what I learned was that veterinarians at that time got paid very poorly and going to veterinary college was akin to becoming a medical doctor, and so the pay was really poor and you had to spend a lot of money to go through college and I couldn’t afford it.
So I became a mechanical engineer, which I really like also. I’m a mechanically oriented person. I used to tell people I was a kid, even though I didn’t have many toys, when I was playing with a toy I’d take it apart and put back together again. So I became…
Ron
Well, that’s the you I know. You’re incredibly technically…you’ve been technically helpful here with me, as you well know, in getting this podcast set up. You’re a technical whiz, and that does lead into your career, and not just solar, but even before solar. So let’s talk about that. What was your early career all about? And and then, how did you get from there to solar, which we’ll talk more about.
Jeff
In 1987 when got out of college I started working for a company Morse Industrial, which was a division of Emerson Electric, which made a broad range of bearings, power transmission, chain drives, v-belt drives, gearing.
Ron
Doesn’t get much more mechanical than that.
Jeff
Yeah. But I did also start selling – much to my surprise, because I wasn’t really prepared for it – AC and DC variable drives. Not as much in the first few years, but as time went on that became a bigger and bigger part of our business and gave me some experience with electrical, which came in handy, needless to say, when I transitioned into solar.
Ron
I believe your job with our friend David Katz at AEE Solar was your very first solar job.
Jeff
Actually, when I was in college, I worked as a telemarketer, calling people when they were eating dinner at night, to see if they wanted to talk to a sales rep about a star-packed solar energy system.
Ron
Okay, I didn’t know this before. That’s interesting.
Jeff
That was my first solar job. I was good at it, but that was at in era when people would answer their phone and talk to somebody. Nowadays, nobody does that.
Ron
Speaking of that, I just read this article about how difficult polling has become, which I guess we knew, but it takes 100 phone calls to get one person to respond to a telephone survey or any kind of poll!
Jeff
And what kind of person do you think actually answers those phone calls?
Ron
That was the point of the article, that this is a person who really, really wants to give their opinion. Which I think tends to skew to people who have extreme and passionate opinions. Anyway, that’s another whole subject.
Okay, so you were working for the bearing company… how did you decide you wanted to get into solar?
Jeff
Well, I had worked for a handful of companies during that era of my career and it was very unsatisfying in many ways. There were some good things about the job obviously. Every job has its good points, but it wasn’t very fulfilling. I didn’t feel like I was bringing any value to the world. I was just selling stuff to people that needed some stuff, and it wasn’t really that interesting.
Ron
It wasn’t fulfilling.
Jeff
I worked for large corporations which have a certain way of doing things that isn’t always easy for me to manage long-term. It can be very soul-crushing at times to work for large corporations, where you’re just a number. What happened was I was talking to a coworker, a wise individual, and I was expressing my displeasure with my career path and he said, you should get this book. It’s called What Color Is Your Parachute?
Ron
Oh right, I remember you told me this once. Yeah, and it’s a well-known book. I never read it, but I’m very aware of it.
Jeff
Yeah, and the basic principle is that ideally, if you want to have a fulfilling career path, what you do is it has you do all these exercises. And the exercise that really stood out, that really made sense to me, was that once you identify what you’re good at and what you’re not good at – and admitting what you’re not good at is a bit of a process, as a lot of people don’t want to admit what they’re not good at.
Ron
That’s right.
Jeff
So you write down what you’re good at what you’re not good at it, and then you write down what you like to do and what you don’t like to do. And then what you do is you look at this as a quadrant and what you try to do in your career path is pair what you’re good at with what you like to do. And this was really quite an eye-opening experience for me, because I walked away knowing that I was good at explaining stuff to people, teaching people and teaching people technical stuff. So I was good at it and I liked it.
And my wife had been encouraging me to investigate solar and she hit me again with, ‘what about solar?’ And my response was well, it’s a pretty interesting technology. I just don’t know if I could make a living in it, and this was 2006 when I first started that research and she encouraged me to do the research.
I found that the biggest trade show was called, in a really kind of generic name, Solar Power 2006. It was in San Jose in September. I registered for the event and that was my entree into the world of photovoltaics. I really never had any personal first-hand exposure to solar outside of things like solar calculators and stuff, like small electronics.
Ron
I’m going to jump ahead here a bit and just let our audience know that your love of teaching and your ability to teach people is something I witnessed firsthand, as have many, many people in the solar industry. Jeff went on to become, and is still, a major figure in solar in many ways. He’s been the secretary of the solar energy certification organization, NABCEP. He’s on the board of the California Solar and Storage Association. He started one of the biggest solar training programs in the country, one of the first for solar, and he’s been in front of audiences worldwide. I think you went to Brazil once and I don’t know where else. But you’ve spoken to many conferences and, well, I can say it and since I’m not you, maybe there’s some objectivity here. Jeff is an amazing speaker and teacher. He knows what to ask and what to say … and he wants to say something right now…
Jeff
I just want to say I’ve done simultaneous translation training in Mexico, so I would have to speak this technical stuff and then the translator would have to translate.
Ron
Interesting, and you don’t speak Spanish
Jeff
I speak like very functional, probably tourist level. Better than nothing.
Ron
Well, that sounds like fun!
So, yeah, you got into solar. Tell us a little bit about what your current company is about, and then we’ll talk about solar and renewable energy in general.
Jeff
So my company today is Planet Plan Sets and we generate permitting plan sets for solar contractors. So when a contractor has to build a solar and/or storage system, they generally need to get a permit from the local building department, which entails having a plan set that would include the cover page, a site plan, which is a drawing of the house from above, showing the street where all the major equipment is going to be located, inside or on this outside of the house.
Then you’d have the electrical wire diagram and all the dealing with the building department and the local ordinances and national electrical standards and so on.
Ron
In fact, that’s another thing that you’ve done. You’ve been on those boards yourself.
Jeff
Well, yeah, the work that we do is very technical when done properly, and we I’m very involved in organizations that are actively engaged in trying to understand the codes and standards and trying to influence better codes and standards in the future. So it’s kind of a less obvious part of our industry, but a really important one, because it dictates the legal way that things can and can’t be done. And obviously, if you don’t do it in a legal way, there’s liability considerations if some problem occurs, and I think what we’re trying to do is set up a structure that allows the industry to succeed in respect to, safety and also takes a realistic approach to that.
Ron
Well, and I was just going to say that this is not only electrical, but it’s a direct-current electrical, so it’s extremely dangerous. It’s powerful. Plus, I remember, we used to say – when I was in the business too, on the marketing side – that two of the most dangerous professions in the country, just statistically, are roofing and electricians. And here, with solar installers, you’re both! You’re a roofer and you’re an electrician. So there’s a lot to do to make sure of safety. The harnesses and all the electrical stuff. So, yeah, it’s a big part of it.
Jeff
Yeah, there are worker safety concerns, which is what you were referencing in the electricians and roofing, because when you work at height, falling off a roof is a very dangerous profession. Most solar contractors are on the roof, but the electrical hazards probably aren’t as severe. But there is other concerns that exist today, especially with lithium batteries, which are oftentimes being installed inside garages, and there’s building departments that are of concern today with that battery. What if something bad happened. What would happen to the house? What would happen to the occupants? So there’s these concerns.
Ron
Fire damage.
Jeff
Yeah, there’s fire concerns, and I think that the codes that exist today have taken those concerns into consideration and implemented what I would argue are practical approaches to manage the safety.
Ron
All right, Jeff. Let’s let’s take a step back and talk to people out there that aren’t terribly familiar with solar. Certainly the public is a whole lot more familiar with solar today than it was back when you and I were in the business in the first decade of the century, but still a lot of people aren’t. I’m gonna just start with some real basic questions and also some of the critiques or hesitancies people have about solar. So let’s start with the most basic. Okay, solar’s great in the daytime. What about night? How do you get electricity when there’s no sunlight to light up those panels?
Jeff
No, the solar doesn’t work at night. That’s the answer. And what you can do is you can have batteries or pull power from the grid. So, essentially, solar is just an additional way to generate electricity in addition to the grid, and you can, in theory, have a battery. So if the grid goes down or you want to buy power from your battery in the evening it’s super expensive from PG&E then.
Ron
Not everybody knows what the grid is. Maybe most people do, but we’re talking about the electrical system, the utility system, that intertwines homes and power plants and transmission lines, and that’s what ‘the grid’ means. You could probably say it better than I just did.
Jeff
No, that’s it. It’s all the power lines that bring power from where it’s generated.
Ron
So we’re going to come back to the grid, and the utility company’s paying you for the power you produce. and all that. It’s been a big, big issue lately. But let’s, let’s stay at the higher level here. Some people say – you know, there’s people who criticize solar, just like there’s people that criticize anything – and there’s vested interests and so on, utility companies, etc. What about the critique I hear some people say well, you’re using a lot of rare earth minerals. Everybody says this is clean energy, but it’s not so clean. The manufacturing process uses toxic materials. There’s the disposal of all that. And when solar panels, 20, 30, 40 years out need to be either recycled or junked or whatever. What about that side of it?
Jeff
Well, as often is the case, some of the stuff that you’re hearing has basis and legitimacy, and some of it’s just absolutely crazy. So the bottom line is that everything has an environmental footprint, but I would argue, despite the fact that lithium batteries or solar modules one day will have to be recycled, the overall impact on earth of that process compared to oil and gas – having worked in the oil and gas industry – it pales in comparison. Essentially the the worst environmental impact of solar and energy storage will be substantially less bad than the worst environmental impacts we see from coal and gas, and oil.
Ron
And I think most people recognize that. Again, I’m just sort of going through the list of objections. Another objection is that, which I think has a little bit more nuance in terms of the response to it, is that, especially when solar was being subsidized through rebates and so on, it was mostly for people that had some money, had a house, had enough money to afford solar, and and so people that couldn’t afford solar were sort of left out. You know what I’m talking about.
Jeff
Well, that’s been a talking point for utilities that try to stop rooftop solar from happening. There was indeed a brief moment in the earlier years of the rapid solar growth years where the people most likely to take advantage of those incentives were wealthier people, often better informed people that were aware of these programs and had more money. But that period kind of passed and in essence the average income of people that have been buying solar in recent years has been very consistent with the average income.
Ron
That’s interesting, I didn’t realize that.
Jeff
But one interesting challenge is that the way the rules have been set by the utilities for people that rent, the rules don’t allow them easy ability to get solar at at fair rates of compensation. Essentially, this is what the utilities have done, is they have reduced the rates of compensation for back-fed kilowatt hours to levels that don’t respect the tremendous value that those locally generated solar kilowatt hours bring to that neighborhood distribution grid.
So the the sad reality is that rooftop solar today is getting woefully and inappropriately compensated for the true value
Ron
Okay, so that brings me to the last general thing about solar, which is this whole issue of locally distributed, on the rooftop versus big fields of solar panels out in the middle of the desert somewhere, which have to be more efficient in general, I would think than the cost of installing on a roof-by-roof, home-by-home basis. In other words, there is a case to be made…
Jeff
That’s what the utilities would like you to believe, but here’s the truth.
Ron
Go for it.
Jeff
You can put those solar arrays in the middle of a desert and you can build them cheap. No argument. The problem is, you’ve got to get that power from the middle of desert to where people live. So you got to build super expensive, super long-to-build transmission infrastructure that the utility gets a guaranteed rate of return on their investment and by the time it affects the consumer, the rates are dramatically higher than they would be if people were allowed to put solar on the rooftops and get fair compensation for the value of bringing that power into those neighborhoods.
Ron
And there’s such a thing as just utility independence, for when the grid goes down, or just because people like to be in charge of their own power.
So if we had a really ethical utility advocate here, somebody who’s a lobbyist for utility companies, what is their best argument for centralized out in the desert, big fields of solar? What’s the best argument they have?
Jeff
The best argument is the utilities want to be a monopoly power provider and do not want competition.
Ron
Okay, but you’re giving me your side of that. What would they say? I mean, there’s got to be some valid point. You can’t tell me they’re all bad. I’m just trying to be the arbiter here. What is the good argument for centralized solar?
Jeff
The way I try to describe the way the utilities are is, in my opinion, today the electric utilities represent the biggest monopolies left, except for the pharmaceutical companies. AT&T, Bell Labs used to have a monopoly on telephone lines. And as a result, when you would call somebody long distance, you were paying top dollar to talk to somebody long distance.
So when they broke up those phone companies phone, the cost of the phone service plummeted. And did the quality of that service go down? To the contrary, we had new, better, less expensive ways than trying to spend a dollar a minute or more to talk across around the world.
The dilemma is that when you say there’s got to be some ethical utility people, I think the ethical utility people don’t really say what they truly are thinking and they are parroting the talking points of their corporate monopoly utility companies. So the monopoly utilities don’t do business the way that normal companies that face competition do business, and they’ve got tremendous power to shut down competition. It’s really a frustrating battle.
Ron
I know that it is a whole NEM thing and all that which we won’t get into the weeds on that…x
Jeff
I’ll tell you what the the utilities will tell you. They’ll say, oh, we can build solar for a dollar a watt in the desert, and that’s true, they can. But what they don’t tell you is how many dollars a watt it takes to build that transmission and distribution.
Ron
I know there’s no simple answer because it depends on the distance and all that, but in terms of dollar per watt that the consumer pays or that it actually costs, whichever way you want to look at it, once it gets into the consumer’s home, whether it comes from the desert or from the rooftop, there’s a certain cost to it. Are you saying that it’s cheaper if it was on my roof?
Jeff
Yes. Essentially what we’re seeing is electricity demand is skyrocketing, with electrification of homes, businesses and vehicles, so as we see more and more electricity required, the grid is woefully underprepared to expand. And it’s so expensive to put in new high-voltage transmission lines, and distribution infrastructure is so expensive to string that stuff through the neighborhoods, so you really would be best served by bringing more and more roofs online, with bringing power in to the home, to reduce the burden of all this extra electric stuff that we’re getting, like electric vehicles, which consume a lot.
Ron
Okay, so we’re here in California, with a Democratic-controlled legislature, we’ve had a Democratic governor for god knows how long. Jerry Brown – even Arnold Schwarzenegger – was very big on solar and environmentalism and so on. We’re getting right into the politics here, and this is part of your CALSSA work, the lobbying organization, the California Solar and Solar Storage Association – which, just full disclosure, my daughter works for CALSSA as the marketing director. Why were they not able to convince Governor Newsom and the legislature and so on to overrule the utilities on the whole big battle about, without getting into the details, about how much consumers get paid for the electricity they generated?
Jeff
Well, the utilities – PG&E in particular – and the the unions are in a marketing agreement to work together to stamp out competition, essentially rooftop solar being that competition. So, essentially, their campaign contributions to Governor Newsom and several other key legislators have been significant. In fact they are the number one political…
Ron
So it’s just a matter of money, and that’s how they’re getting their campaigns paid for.
Jeff
They’ve got the money to spend and they are smart. They’ve been entrenched utilities. For goodness sakes, they have all of the political connections by nature of the many decades of being a monopoly power provider for one of the most populated parts of the world.
Ron
Well, okay, and then on the other side, there’s a whole bunch of people that are very, very strongly advocates of solar, including solar home owners and people who are using it and buying it, and they are a powerful force. I’m one of them. You’re one of them, of course. You’re in Arizona. So it’s just a matter of the big power, they’re more powerful, in terms of the final decision, then the populace. Is that what happened in a nutshell?
Jeff
Well, and we like to think of our country as a representative democracy, but the reality is that we are a country that has a political system that allows special interest groups to fund campaigns that go against the public.
Ron
That’s such a frustrating fact that always kills me to think about.
And that kind of gets into our Fly part of this where we talk about bigger issues. But let me ask you one more, maybe a good connecting question: what do you see as the role of solar in particular, and renewable energy in general, in battling climate change and ecological devastation and destruction? How big a role is it, or is it just a nice thing to have but we really need to focus on … well, we obviously do need to focus on other elements as well, but what place does solar and renewable play in the battle against climate change?
Jeff
I feel based on all that I’ve seen over the years I have been working in this arena – and even prior to that, just my general industrial interactions – I feel solar seems to be the most cost-effective, environmentally friendly way to generate electricity. It’s not the only method that needs to be utilized, but it seems to be one of the best, if not the best, for many parts of the country.
Ron
There’s a lot of people, including some environmentalists, who say that until we can transition fully to renewable, that we need to use nuclear to stop the oil from going into the air. What are you on nuclear? What are your feelings on that?
Jeff
Well, nuclear is just not a very practical strategy because of the massive amount of time it takes to design and permit and build and yeah, it’s just impractical. Plain and simple. Solar can be deployed really quickly. Essentially, the technology is pretty simple.
I would say again, I don’t see nuclear as a very easy solution. I’d be probably okay with it but I think the challenge is that nuclear is so much more expensive than people realize. So I just kind of don’t think that it’s.
Ron
You don’t think it’s going to have a renaissance.
Jeff
I don’t think so, no. But I also feel that there needs to be a recognition that, while you can get solar to generate your electricity, if you consume energy, electricity wastefully, then you’re not being really sensible. I think that, by and large, mankind around the world needs to be conscientious that frivolous use of electricity – buying a huge monster SUV that’s an electric vehicle – doesn’t make you environmentally friendly. It just means that you’ve got an electric vehicle that’s really an energy hog. Electric vehicles can be energy hogs.
Ron
Hogging energy. It doesn’t really matter where it’s coming from if you are using it more than you have to. Let’s move into the bigger picture issues here, and we’ll start with global warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it. A lot of scientists and environmentalists and so on who say we’re already past the tipping point, it’s too late. We should have acted 30, 40, 20, at least 10, 5 years ago. In the meantime, emissions keep going up, the soil keeps getting abused. In other words, the ongoing ecological devastation, destruction, whatever noun you want to use, is going on. It doesn’t seem to be abating much at all. Maybe there’s exceptions. I’m sure there are. But are we past the tipping point? What do you think, Jeff? Do we still have hope of turning this temperature down on this planet?
Jeff
I don’t know. What I will say is… I certainly thought a lot about these kinds of questions throughout my life. I told people I never had kids, so it just gives me a lot of time to think. As I’ve thought about these things. I think my solution to the angst that’s caused by not being able to understand what the future holds is I became a Dudeist, which I think a lot of people feel to be a bit of a comical.…
Ron
Well, it’s because it came from a comedy.
Jeff
Well, yeah, so Dudeism is a religion that was started out of the movie The Big Lebowski, which is about Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski, a kind of a guy who just takes it easy and doesn’t really have a lot going on, like he’s content
Ron
Great movie, by the way.
Jeff
He’s very at peace with the universe, and essentially what this did was spawn what I think at first was kind of half-joking, but essentially the basic principle is to take into consideration Jeff Lebowski’s –the Dude’s – outlook on the world, and that really is akin to what’s called Taoism.
Taoism is, of course, an ancient Eastern philosophy. I wouldn’t call it religion so much. It allows you to understand your place in the universe, and so whenever I’ve thought about these really big issues, I just tend to look at what my role is in the universe and I’ve come to peace with what my role is and what I’m able to do and what I’m unable to do and I try to make a positive contribution in the work that I do.
I do a lot of volunteer work, but I do it with the hopes that it will help the world overcome the energy problems that it has, and it’s given me at least some personal satisfaction that the work that I’m doing while I’m alive will kind of build karma points. I just don’t want to lay on my deathbed and think that my life didn’t matter, and prior to giving it to solar, that’s the way I felt, but thankfully solar’s allowed me now to feel like I’m doing something worthwhile.
Ron
You know it’s interesting. What comes to mind, Jeff, is … this started by me asking you what you thought the chances were of humanity turning the corner on all these things that are destructive. We were starting with global warming and you went right into Dudeism, and the personal inner approach, call it spiritual, religious, whatever you want to call it, but personal, inward.
And I see, you know I follow all this stuff and I’m a pretty spiritual guy myself in my own way, and I see a lot of people who are real activists out there badmouthing that approach, like, oh, that’s just a way of escaping and zoning out.
But you’re actually a really good example of exactly the opposite. What you just said, your work is all about promoting a healthy lifestyle, and I know you personally so I know about how you feel about conservation, sustainability, et cetera. I guess I’m making the point that having a way of being at peace with everything doesn’t mean that you’ve given up on working on it, and in fact it probably makes you a whole lot more effective.
Jeff
I work like crazy. I work all the time. I’m trying to advance the cause of solar energy because I feel I can do that I’m in a position to be able to do it. I’m trying to take my capabilities and apply them in a way that’s going to be good for the future development.
Ron
Okay, I do want to broaden that beyond just environmental and solar and all that, and we’ve touched on it already. But what about again, in terms of ‘actionable wisdom for turbulent times’ – we’re in turbulent times in many, many ways. We’ve got authoritarianism rising around the world, not to mention even in our own so-called democracy I shouldn’t say so-called democracy, I’d call it a fledgling democracy. There’s the huge wealth gap. We’ve got billionaires flying into space while there are people starving. And there’s so many very difficult issues. I don’t know if there’s any of those that are particularly impactful for you that you feel you have something to share or want to, or … what are you most concerned about?
Jeff
I think, sustainability. I think that humanity needs to come to grips with the fact that everything we do, all our choices, throwing something in the garbage can, there’s an impact that that has on the planet around us. And if we continue to extract more out of the environment that we live in and all we do is throw away waste products that actually taint our environment, like carbon emissions, also plastics, for goodness sakes.
I think that there’s an awakening occurring when people are thinking it’s not just that plastic bottle that may never get recycled, but it’s the fact that it puts out these toxic chemicals…
Ron
It’s in our drinking water!
Jeff
Yeah. So I’d like to think that in the not too distant future, humanity will wake up about the concept of sustainability and that what we take out of the environment, we have to put back into the environment. If we continue to extract and not put back, we’re bankrupt.
Ron
So I completely agree, as do many people. And yet here we are, we continue to do it. What’s keeping us from implementing what seems to many of us, I would guess the majority, on this planet obvious, obvious stuff about wealth disparity, about sustainability, about not abusing the earth. But we’ve got such huge forces aligned against us: consumerism and advertising and big money and profit. What do we do? How can we break the hold that this big consumerist, corporate, whatever you want to call it mindset has on us in our individual lives and then as a society?
Jeff
I do feel that being politically aware is of civic responsibility. I learned that in high school, when they used to have a class called civics, and I don’t hear most people in the country that seem to believe that they have a civic responsibility. They have civic obligations as being a member of society.
Ron
How do we change?
Jeff
I’ve always been a strong believer in a good education system. Even though I don’t have any kids, I’ve always been a supporter in funding education properly. So you get good quality teachers, good quality schools and good quality education. I think that what we’ve seen is that if you, if these issues matter, then you have to get involved in politics at the local level.
Ron
I think that’s a real key thing.
Jeff
Yeah, I think a lot of people look at politics as just the national elections.
Ron
So I hear you and I feel guilty myself for never having been very involved. I’ve done work for nonprofits and such, but I’ve never gotten involved in local politics. And the forces that have? I mean the real strongly right-leaning people and powers. They figured this out some time ago and have taken over local governments and state legislatures and look what we’ve got.
Jeff
In some respects maybe not surprising, given humanity and history, and when you look at the way that things happen in the past, what we’re experiencing today. Certainly there’s a lot of parallels to past, historical events and so I guess the question is, is there any hope for humanity? And honestly, I don’t know. I would say that I, I’ve tried to and I don’t just try to… I definitely have this bigger perspective. I see that there is a universe out there, I see that my existence in that universe is absolutely insignificant. No matter what I do, good or bad, my impact on the universe as a whole is absolutely insignificant. But at the same token, I want to do what I can to try to make the world a better place for others while I’m here. While, in the overall scheme of things, I suspect that that all my efforts will not change the course of the universe, because universe is so vast. But maybe it’ll help.
Ron
It’s really an interesting contrast, isn’t it? To realize – it can either be crippling or sort of comforting – to realize that you’re just a spec on a vast universe that, as you say, has no real significance, and yet try to get out a bed in the morning and have some significance. It’s an interesting contrast that we live with.
Jeff
Because because I want to help people that deserve to be helped. I guess you could say it’s a selfish perspective, because the people that I am able to help, when they demonstrate their gratitude, it’s a really heartwarming experience.
Ron
It is, and you suggest your help is … to use the cliche helping an elderly person across the street. Every little bit helps, and not only helps there, it spreads. People see what you. People are moved by kindness, acts of kindness, to do so themselves.
I remember once having a realization along these lines years ago. I realized just what you said, how incredibly small, infinitesimally small part of the world, let alone the universe that I am. And yet, at the same time, I felt empowered because I realized I was connected to all of that. I’m a small part of it, but I’m connected to the whole, and this means there’s some power – I don’t know if ‘power’ is the right word, peace and power together – in realizing that, that, yes, you’re small, but you’re connected. So the more you realize and act on that connectedness, the more your influence ripples out.
Jeff
And I have very modest expectations. I do not have the anticipation that I’ll be a famous person. I don’t have the desire for any kind of fame whatsoever. I just wanted to do what I can to help the people that I care about, the people that are around me. There are customers, the people that work for our company. I want to do what I can to help those people because I like them and I care about them and I’m gonna do the best that I can to help them and help the solar industry succeed, because I think that solar energy does have real potential for helping future generations.
Ron
You know, Jeff, I think you just landed, in terms of my four-part structure of the ground, focus, fly and land. You just … I think that’s it. You do what you can and you find a philosophy that allows you to accept the world as it is it, yet work on changing the world where you can. And not to be buttering you up or anything, or but you’re a good example of that. You found your peace in your Dudeism and whatever else, and knowing that you’re just a small part of the grand picture, and yet you’re out there every day working on something that helps the planet. So congratulations.
Jeff
I feel my advice for others is, like I did, try to identify what you’re good at, what you like to do. Try to also identify we’re not a good at what you don’t like to do. And then, when you figure out what you’re good at and you like to do, do it to the best your ability and try to make a positive contribution to the world around you. And I think you know what a positive contribution is. And and if you’re not doing that, then volunteer time, get politically engaged. Just go out there and do random acts of kindness.
Ron
The world around you, immediately around you, not necessarily the whole world, and that’s… I think not having grandiose visions, which is something I have been susceptible my whole life, in terms of thinking I might have some bigger impact and all that, but it’s so important to realize…I mean, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, as long as you are… you can think globally as long as you are acting locally. The key is to be kind to your family and the people around you and do what you say and live with integrity, all the things that people pretty much agree on.
That’s one of the things that’s always been frustrating to me, that the great majority of humanity knows what it means to be a good person, and most people are good people, but we don’t have very good leadership, and it’s my view. I mean overall, there’s no general statement about that, but if we’re gonna have any chance of making it, it seems to me, we’re gonna need to get some kind of enlightened, more enlightened leadership to to make these big decisions that affect us all profoundly.
Ron
Hello and welcome to Wise Talkers. I’m Ronald Fel Jones, host and producer of the podcast.
The theme of Wise Talkers is Actionable Wisdom for Turbulent Times, and I seek that wisdom in one on one conversations with thought leaders and change makers from a wide variety of backgrounds, and as we delve into their work and their ideas, we explore realistic ways to positively affect our lives, both individually and collectively, in these truly extraordinary times.
This is a brand new podcast. In fact, this is just the second edition of Wise Talkers. The first was published a few weeks ago, based around an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder that I conducted 45 years ago. In many ways, that inaugural edition of Wise Talkers sets the tone for everything to follow, so I hope you’ll check it out if you haven’t listened to it already.
You can get more information on the podcast, including all the episodes published, on our website, wisetalkers.com. We’re also on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, Google, etc.
Tonight’s guest is Jeff Spies, founder and CEO of a solar energy services company and a widely known technical expert and educator in the solar energy field. He’s also the co-producer of a wonderful film documenting the early days of the solar industry, and we’ll talk about all of that soon. I’ve titled this episode Jeff Spies: The Solar Dude Abides, and if you’ve seen the movie The Big Lebowski, you’ll understand why I chose that title, as Jeff talks about, among many other things, finding peace of mind in his life by becoming a Dudeist. And if you haven’t seen The Big Lebowski, well, I’ll explain the reference in the episode title at the end.
So my interview with Jeff will be coming right up. But first, since this is a brand new podcast, a couple of updates about Wise Talkers status and plans.
My initial idea was to publish a new Wise Talkers episode every week, and I still plan to get up to that frequency at some point, probably sometime this summer. But now that I’ve had some actual experience in all that it takes to get a podcast going, which is a lot more work than I naively thought it would be at the beginning, I realize that the pace is going to be a little slower here in the early going as we get up to speed. So for now, new full episodes will be published as they’re produced, which could be anywhere from a week apart to up to, say, three or four weeks apart.
And, as I said, you can always check the latest schedules on the website wisetalkers.com, and you can also comment on and join discussions about episodes there, and also subscribe to be notified whenever a new episode is published.
Okay, now a word about my four-part structure for conducting these interviews, which I’ve dubbed Ground… Focus… Fly… and Land. We’ll start in the Ground section with learning about the guests’ childhood, where they grew up, family situation, education and so on. Early life influences and interests, formative experiences and such.
Then we’ll switch to the Focus segment, where we’ll dive into the guests’ work and career, explore what they’re working on, what they’re passionate about.
Then on the Fly, where we broaden out to discuss some of the bigger issues that we all face in this turbulent world and look into what I have come to regard is the defining question of the Wise Talkers podcast, namely:
What do we need to do to make this a better world for all of us?
Now, that’s a broad question, to be sure, no simple answers, but it’s a question I believe we benefit by asking and conscientiously exploring. And it’s a topic that everybody has a stake in, obviously, and that we all have ideas about. We all have wisdom to share.
Then we’ll close in the Land segment. Summing it up, where are you now with your life and passions? What do you see ahead, both personally and globally? And I’ll ask my guests how they personally deal with the stresses and traumas in the world and in their own life.
Essentially, we’ll try to close with the theme of the Wise Talkers podcast. What actionable wisdom have we gained here– you and your life, and maybe even us here, in this interview.
This four-part structure is a general interviewing strategy, certainly not a script, and each conversation will naturally take its own course.
Okay, a final word about my interview with Jeff before, well, before listening to it. As I mentioned, Jeff and a friend and colleague of his, Jason Vetterli – actually a good friend of both Jeff and mine – and a very talented videographer – are in the final stages of producing a truly remarkable film that they’ve been working on since about 2015. It’s all about documenting the early days of the solar industry. The film is called Solar Roots, the Pioneers of PV and it’ll be released to free video-streaming. I believe they hope to get it out sometime later this year.
I wanted to add a little more about the film than we were able to talk about in our conversation last week, so I decided to rearrange things a bit here in the editing room and treat our discussion of the movie as an addendum to the main interview, so I could give it some more emphasis and some additional information, including how you can be informed about its release. So that will be coming right up after the main interview, which is coming up, well, right now.
—- music
Ron
My guest tonight is Jeff Spies. Jeff is the founder and CEO of a solar energy service company called Planet Plan Sets, which I’ll let Jeff describe himself here in just a moment.
Jeff and I are good friends, you should know that, and we’ve known each other for close to 20 years now. We met and got to know each other when we were both working in the solar industry. We both got to work for the same company, which we’ll probably talk about a bit. Those were really exciting days in the solar industry and in fact, we worked together at a couple of a different solar companies back in those days. So, without further ado, as they say, hello Jeff,
Jeff
Hey Ron, good to be here.
Ron
So, Jeff, let’s start at the beginning, just like you’re telling your life story from scratch. I believe you were born about, if I remember correctly, 1964, correct?
Jeff
Yeah, 1964, in Detroit, although my parents lived in Warren, Michigan
My childhood was tumultuous. My mother died when I was three years old, my sister and brother a year or two ahead of me, and it was a very difficult period of our lives that was highly unstable as a result of her death.
Ron
So you’re three or four when she died? That’s the age when we may or may not remember things, do you? I mean, you must have some memory of her being gone, but do you have any memory of her death?
Jeff
Well not of her death, but I do remember distinctly two things. One was she was tucking me into bed at night, and another one she was peeling apples in the kitchen, which is a nice memory.
Ron
These are your childhood memories of your mom…
Jeff
That’s correct. The age of awareness, for me at least, was before I was four, because she died when I was a couple months shy on my fourth birthday.
Ron
Gosh, that’s… well… where do you go from that? That’s a very painful thing, needless to say, to happen to anybody at any age, and as a child that young… I can’t even imagine it, Jeff. Must have been…
Jeff
You know, the funny thing is, you’re at that age where you don’t really know what normality is, so it’s not.…
Ron
Yeah, that’s a good point. Your memories of her death aren’t there, but the absence that you feel is … I don’t know, there’s no good time to lose your mother as a child. No way to finesse that.
Jeff
I’m sure it was. Her death was in itself problematic, but I think that the bigger problem was that my father was not a good person. And after a few years he met another woman who did not like us kids. It was a very unpleasant environment to live in and we were shipped off to boarding school. My brother and I went to military Catholic boarding school, so I started that in the first grade. I went to first grade through eighth grade to military Catholic boarding schools
Ron
Military Catholic school? Those are two terms I don’t normally hear together. I didn’t know there was such a thing as military Catholic boarding school.
Jeff
We lived at this school and were schooled by nuns. Some of them were really nice, some of them were horrible. Sister Anna May, who was like I think for me first grade, maybe first and second. She was a super sweet lady.
Then, fifth through ninth was a school much further away from my father’s house. But in weekends and the summertime I would be bouncing between relatives. My grandparents did watch me, my mother’s parents, a fair bit. When I was growing up my grandfather was just a wonderful, wonderful man, like my close, close friend, and it was good to have at least yeah.
Ron
I’ll say. Some family support.
Jeff
Yeah, with people that did care
Ron
So, just because I’m curious about this, what is the military part of the military Catholic boarding school?
Jeff
Well, it’s like being in boot camp, except you’re a little kid. You’re in school and you’re being treated like you’re in boot camp, where in the morning … boy, I’ll tell you I’ll never forget this… well, it doesn’t happen much anymore, but it happened through much my adult life, where I would hear reveille as soon as I’d wake up in the morning, because they used to have somebody blowing reveille on a bugle at whatever ungodly hour. They used to wake us up in the morning, every day for our entire school life. There were some weekends that we would go away from the school, but by and large you would hear that song over and over and over. So it gets like programmed into your brain to where you wake up and that’s the first thing your brain thinks, right?
Ron
Wow, so military…there’s nothing to do with actual US Military, I assume, just a form of martial education.
Jeff
I’ve never seen combat, unless you consider the nuns whacking me with a ruler, and they whacked you with other things, too. They were… some of them were cruel. And then, after eighth grade, we did move in with some other family members in Marine City, Michigan, and we completed our school there. So I went through my high school years in a small town in Marine City, which is on the St. Clair River that connects Lake Huron to Lake St Clair. So that river is very cold. If you try to swim in it you’re gonna freeze. Well, I don’t know about any more, but man back in those days even in the summer that river was cold all year round.
Ron
Global warming may have taken care of that for you.
Jeff
Yes, maybe. So… my mother died and, as I was growing up, we didn’t really discuss it. Quite honestly, life was difficult just because of the abusive environment we were living in with my father and his girlfriend. She had four kids of her own and she definitely did not like my father’s kids, obviously, so that I think that was part of the reason that she was so abusive towards us.
Ron
Even in the best of circumstances, step child and step parent relationships are difficult, but you’re saying she was beyond just the normal difficult.
Jeff
Oh yeah, she was. It was an unpleasant environment, to say the least. I remember there were times when she wouldn’t even allow us in the house. There was one summer that, after we got back from military Catholic boarding school, that I lived in the camper in the backyard the whole summer and was not allowed to go in the house, and that’s really strange. I think, is a lot of kids have to go through that, have really unfortunate circumstances. But it was certainly not a normal childhood.
Ron
Was it just you that was singled out, or all three of you?
Jeff
Well, I think all of us definitely were affected by this really negative environment and so no, I wasn’t singled out. But one thing I’ll say is I remember there was one incident where I was in the house and apparently I was little excited and running around and making noise and she whacked me in the face with a two-by-four, knocked me out.
Ron
With a two-by-four??
Jeff
Yeah. So I think that in this day, and age, if there was a recognition of what was happening, the legal implications would have been far different.
Ron
How old were you when that happened?
Jeff
Oh gee, I would have been pretty young still, somewhere around, I’m gonna guess third, fourth grade. Because after the fifth grade, thankfully, we were no longer allowed to come back to her house, which was awesome for me.
I was able to live with my grandparents in the offseason. They were really wonderful and thankfully we had a really really kind family. My brother was friends with his fellow named Paul Bernard in grade school. Paul unfortunately died when he’s 18 of a diabetic coma. Paul was type-one diabetic and insulin dependent.
But his aunt and uncle, who were his primary guardians, just took my brother and I into their home and treated us like parents. That lasted for, I don’t know, probably a couple years, and it was really wonderful having that kind of parental experience with two very caring people, Larry and Norma.
Ron
Well, one thing I would think is I just know from some issues in my own extended family, and kids growing up in a difficult environment for whatever reason, the parenting isn’t great. for one reason or another; they tend to think that’s the way the world is. We all grow up thinking our world is the world. And then if they get the opportunity to stay with other parents, other families who play the parenting role, one of the big advantages is just opening their eyes to the fact that, hey, the world doesn’t have to be that way I grew up all that time. There is such a thing as loving parents, good parents. Does that ring true at all for your experience here? I see you nodding your head there.
Jeff
Well, very much. Not only did I have this very positive experience with my grandparents, where my grandfather was like my father, really, and with Larry and Norma Mercurio, who were very kind, caring people, but I had that same experience with my Aunt Glennis, who unfortunately died about 15 years ago, and she was a wonderful woman who helped me hang in there and, yeah, keep my hopes alive.
Yeah, and then in high school, when I first left grade school in ninth grade, my brother and I moved up to Marine City and we lived with my mother’s cousin and her husband and their two sons, and and it was a difficult adjustment for me because it was the first time I’d really gone to a normal school, other than the first half of first grade and kindergarten. But, yeah, I was then immersed into kind of a bit more real-world environment that I wasn’t well prepared for, and it was a difficult period in my life.
And then I went to Michigan State University. I did well in school and I was able, through a combination of loans and scholarships, to be able to afford to go to Michigan State, which was in the early 80s, and it was, by today’s standards, very utilitarian. I just went back this past summer with a friend to look around campus and I was shocked at how fancy everything has become.
But I was able to go to school there and it was a state university, yeah it was a wonderful experience and it opened my eyes to the world and I had a chance to start trying to get my head screwed on straight after all of the difficult years growing up. So I think I made that transition into a different person in college. And it’s been a continual process ever since.
Ron
Why don’t we take being in college as a transition. What were you interested in school? Did you know what you wanted to be, so to speak, at any given age? What kind of things fascinated you as a kid? And then, what did you study in college?
Jeff
I had been inspired to become a veterinarian because I liked the book All Creatures, Great and Small. It’s a good book and I’m watching the PBS show. It’s been really good.
Ron
Yeah, I haven’t read it, but I know it’s widely lauded. So How long did you think that’s what you’d be, and when did you change your mind about that?
Jeff
I worked at the veterinary clinic in Michigan State University when I first started going to school there.
That was my first job and I worked my way through college by and large.
Ron
No kidding, I didn’t know that. That’s great.
Jeff
Yeah and what I learned was that veterinarians at that time got paid very poorly and going to veterinary college was akin to becoming a medical doctor, and so the pay was really poor and you had to spend a lot of money to go through college and I couldn’t afford it.
So I became a mechanical engineer, which I really like also. I’m a mechanically oriented person. I used to tell people I was a kid, even though I didn’t have many toys, when I was playing with a toy I’d take it apart and put back together again. So I became…
Ron
Well, that’s the you I know. You’re incredibly technically…you’ve been technically helpful here with me, as you well know, in getting this podcast set up. You’re a technical whiz, and that does lead into your career, and not just solar, but even before solar. So let’s talk about that. What was your early career all about? And and then, how did you get from there to solar, which we’ll talk more about.
Jeff
In 1987 when got out of college I started working for a company Morse Industrial, which was a division of Emerson Electric, which made a broad range of bearings, power transmission, chain drives, v-belt drives, gearing.
Ron
Doesn’t get much more mechanical than that.
Jeff
Yeah. But I did also start selling – much to my surprise, because I wasn’t really prepared for it – AC and DC variable drives. Not as much in the first few years, but as time went on that became a bigger and bigger part of our business and gave me some experience with electrical, which came in handy, needless to say, when I transitioned into solar.
Ron
I believe your job with our friend David Katz at AEE Solar was your very first solar job.
Jeff
Actually, when I was in college, I worked as a telemarketer, calling people when they were eating dinner at night, to see if they wanted to talk to a sales rep about a star-packed solar energy system.
Ron
19:36
Okay, I didn’t know this before. That’s interesting.
Jeff
That was my first solar job. I was good at it, but that was at in era when people would answer their phone and talk to somebody. Nowadays, nobody does that.
Ron
Speaking of that, I just read this article about how difficult polling has become, which I guess we knew, but it takes 100 phone calls to get one person to respond to a telephone survey or any kind of poll!
Jeff
And what kind of person do you think actually answers those phone calls?
Ron
That was the point of the article, that this is a person who really, really wants to give their opinion. Which I think tends to skew to people who have extreme and passionate opinions. Anyway, that’s another whole subject.
Okay, so you were working for the bearing company… how did you decide you wanted to get into solar?
Jeff
Well, I had worked for a handful of companies during that era of my career and it was very unsatisfying in many ways. There were some good things about the job obviously. Every job has its good points, but it wasn’t very fulfilling. I didn’t feel like I was bringing any value to the world. I was just selling stuff to people that needed some stuff, and it wasn’t really that interesting.
Ron
It wasn’t fulfilling.
Jeff
I worked for large corporations which have a certain way of doing things that isn’t always easy for me to manage long-term. It can be very soul-crushing at times to work for large corporations, where you’re just a number. What happened was I was talking to a coworker, a wise individual, and I was expressing my displeasure with my career path and he said, you should get this book. It’s called What Color Is Your Parachute?
Ron
Oh right, I remember you told me this once. Yeah, and it’s a well-known book. I never read it, but I’m very aware of it.
Jeff
Yeah, and the basic principle is that ideally, if you want to have a fulfilling career path, what you do is it has you do all these exercises. And the exercise that really stood out, that really made sense to me, was that once you identify what you’re good at and what you’re not good at – and admitting what you’re not good at is a bit of a process, as a lot of people don’t want to admit what they’re not good at.
Ron
That’s right.
Jeff
So you write down what you’re good at what you’re not good at it, and then you write down what you like to do and what you don’t like to do. And then what you do is you look at this as a quadrant and what you try to do in your career path is pair what you’re good at with what you like to do. And this was really quite an eye-opening experience for me, because I walked away knowing that I was good at explaining stuff to people, teaching people and teaching people technical stuff. So I was good at it and I liked it.
And my wife had been encouraging me to investigate solar and she hit me again with, ‘what about solar?’ And my response was well, it’s a pretty interesting technology. I just don’t know if I could make a living in it, and this was 2006 when I first started that research and she encouraged me to do the research.
I found that the biggest trade show was called, in a really kind of generic name, Solar Power 2006. It was in San Jose in September. I registered for the event and that was my entree into the world of photovoltaics. I really never had any personal first-hand exposure to solar outside of things like solar calculators and stuff, like small electronics.
Ron
I’m going to jump ahead here a bit and just let our audience know that your love of teaching and your ability to teach people is something I witnessed firsthand, as have many, many people in the solar industry. Jeff went on to become, and is still, a major figure in solar in many ways. He’s been the secretary of the solar energy certification organization, NABCEP. He’s on the board of the California Solar and Storage Association. He started one of the biggest solar training programs in the country, one of the first for solar, and he’s been in front of audiences worldwide. I think you went to Brazil once and I don’t know where else. But you’ve spoken to many conferences and, well, I can say it and since I’m not you, maybe there’s some objectivity here. Jeff is an amazing speaker and teacher. He knows what to ask and what to say … and he wants to say something right now…
Jeff
I just want to say I’ve done simultaneous translation training in Mexico, so I would have to speak this technical stuff and then the translator would have to translate.
Ron
Interesting, and you don’t speak Spanish
Jeff
I speak like very functional, probably tourist level. Better than nothing.
Ron
Well, that sounds like fun!
So, yeah, you got into solar. Tell us a little bit about what your current company is about, and then we’ll talk about solar and renewable energy in general.
Jeff
So my company today is Planet Plan Sets and we generate permitting plan sets for solar contractors. So when a contractor has to build a solar and/or storage system, they generally need to get a permit from the local building department, which entails having a plan set that would include the cover page, a site plan, which is a drawing of the house from above, showing the street where all the major equipment is going to be located, inside or on this outside of the house.
Then you’d have the electrical wire diagram and all the dealing with the building department and the local ordinances and national electrical standards and so on.
Ron
In fact, that’s another thing that you’ve done. You’ve been on those boards yourself.
Jeff
Well, yeah, the work that we do is very technical when done properly, and we I’m very involved in organizations that are actively engaged in trying to understand the codes and standards and trying to influence better codes and standards in the future. So it’s kind of a less obvious part of our industry, but a really important one, because it dictates the legal way that things can and can’t be done. And obviously, if you don’t do it in a legal way, there’s liability considerations if some problem occurs, and I think what we’re trying to do is set up a structure that allows the industry to succeed in respect to, safety and also takes a realistic approach to that.
Ron
Well, and I was just going to say that this is not only electrical, but it’s a direct-current electrical, so it’s extremely dangerous. It’s powerful. Plus, I remember, we used to say – when I was in the business too, on the marketing side – that two of the most dangerous professions in the country, just statistically, are roofing and electricians. And here, with solar installers, you’re both! You’re a roofer and you’re an electrician. So there’s a lot to do to make sure of safety. The harnesses and all the electrical stuff. So, yeah, it’s a big part of it.
Jeff
Yeah, there are worker safety concerns, which is what you were referencing in the electricians and roofing, because when you work at height, falling off a roof is a very dangerous profession. Most solar contractors are on the roof, but the electrical hazards probably aren’t as severe. But there is other concerns that exist today, especially with lithium batteries, which are oftentimes being installed inside garages, and there’s building departments that are of concern today with that battery. What if something bad happened. What would happen to the house? What would happen to the occupants? So there’s these concerns.
Ron
Fire damage.
Jeff
Yeah, there’s fire concerns, and I think that the codes that exist today have taken those concerns into consideration and implemented what I would argue are practical approaches to manage the safety.
Ron
All right, Jeff. Let’s let’s take a step back and talk to people out there that aren’t terribly familiar with solar. Certainly the public is a whole lot more familiar with solar today than it was back when you and I were in the business in the first decade of the century, but still a lot of people aren’t. I’m gonna just start with some real basic questions and also some of the critiques or hesitancies people have about solar. So let’s start with the most basic. Okay, solar’s great in the daytime. What about night? How do you get electricity when there’s no sunlight to light up those panels?
Jeff
No, the solar doesn’t work at night. That’s the answer. And what you can do is you can have batteries or pull power from the grid. So, essentially, solar is just an additional way to generate electricity in addition to the grid, and you can, in theory, have a battery. So if the grid goes down or you want to buy power from your battery in the evening it’s super expensive from PG&E then.
Ron
Not everybody knows what the grid is. Maybe most people do, but we’re talking about the electrical system, the utility system, that intertwines homes and power plants and transmission lines, and that’s what ‘the grid’ means. You could probably say it better than I just did.
Jeff
No, that’s it. It’s all the power lines that bring power from where it’s generated.
Ron
So we’re going to come back to the grid, and the utility company’s paying you for the power you produce. and all that. It’s been a big, big issue lately. But let’s, let’s stay at the higher level here. Some people say – you know, there’s people who criticize solar, just like there’s people that criticize anything – and there’s vested interests and so on, utility companies, etc. What about the critique I hear some people say well, you’re using a lot of rare earth minerals. Everybody says this is clean energy, but it’s not so clean. The manufacturing process uses toxic materials. There’s the disposal of all that. And when solar panels, 20, 30, 40 years out need to be either recycled or junked or whatever. What about that side of it?
Jeff
Well, as often is the case, some of the stuff that you’re hearing has basis and legitimacy, and some of it’s just absolutely crazy. So the bottom line is that everything has an environmental footprint, but I would argue, despite the fact that lithium batteries or solar modules one day will have to be recycled, the overall impact on earth of that process compared to oil and gas – having worked in the oil and gas industry – it pales in comparison. Essentially the the worst environmental impact of solar and energy storage will be substantially less bad than the worst environmental impacts we see from coal and gas, and oil.
Ron
And I think most people recognize that. Again, I’m just sort of going through the list of objections. Another objection is that, which I think has a little bit more nuance in terms of the response to it, is that, especially when solar was being subsidized through rebates and so on, it was mostly for people that had some money, had a house, had enough money to afford solar, and and so people that couldn’t afford solar were sort of left out. You know what I’m talking about.
Jeff
Well, that’s been a talking point for utilities that try to stop rooftop solar from happening. There was indeed a brief moment in the earlier years of the rapid solar growth years where the people most likely to take advantage of those incentives were wealthier people, often better informed people that were aware of these programs and had more money. But that period kind of passed and in essence the average income of people that have been buying solar in recent years has been very consistent with the average income.
Ron
That’s interesting, I didn’t realize that.
Jeff
But one interesting challenge is that the way the rules have been set by the utilities for people that rent, the rules don’t allow them easy ability to get solar at at fair rates of compensation. Essentially, this is what the utilities have done, is they have reduced the rates of compensation for back-fed kilowatt hours to levels that don’t respect the tremendous value that those locally generated solar kilowatt hours bring to that neighborhood distribution grid.
So the the sad reality is that rooftop solar today is getting woefully and inappropriately compensated for the true value
Ron
Okay, so that brings me to the last general thing about solar, which is this whole issue of locally distributed, on the rooftop versus big fields of solar panels out in the middle of the desert somewhere, which have to be more efficient in general, I would think than the cost of installing on a roof-by-roof, home-by-home basis. In other words, there is a case to be made…
Jeff
That’s what the utilities would like you to believe, but here’s the truth.
Ron
Go for it.
Jeff
You can put those solar arrays in the middle of a desert and you can build them cheap. No argument. The problem is, you’ve got to get that power from the middle of desert to where people live. So you got to build super expensive, super long-to-build transmission infrastructure that the utility gets a guaranteed rate of return on their investment and by the time it affects the consumer, the rates are dramatically higher than they would be if people were allowed to put solar on the rooftops and get fair compensation for the value of bringing that power into those neighborhoods.
Ron
And there’s such a thing as just utility independence, for when the grid goes down, or just because people like to be in charge of their own power.
So if we had a really ethical utility advocate here, somebody who’s a lobbyist for utility companies, what is their best argument for centralized out in the desert, big fields of solar? What’s the best argument they have?
Jeff
The best argument is the utilities want to be a monopoly power provider and do not want competition.
Ron
Okay, but you’re giving me your side of that. What would they say? I mean, there’s got to be some valid point. You can’t tell me they’re all bad. I’m just trying to be the arbiter here. What is the good argument for centralized solar?
Jeff
The way I try to describe the way the utilities are is, in my opinion, today the electric utilities represent the biggest monopolies left, except for the pharmaceutical companies. AT&T, Bell Labs used to have a monopoly on telephone lines. And as a result, when you would call somebody long distance, you were paying top dollar to talk to somebody long distance.
So when they broke up those phone companies phone, the cost of the phone service plummeted. And did the quality of that service go down? To the contrary, we had new, better, less expensive ways than trying to spend a dollar a minute or more to talk across around the world.
The dilemma is that when you say there’s got to be some ethical utility people, I think the ethical utility people don’t really say what they truly are thinking and they are parroting the talking points of their corporate monopoly utility companies. So the monopoly utilities don’t do business the way that normal companies that face competition do business, and they’ve got tremendous power to shut down competition. It’s really a frustrating battle.
Ron
I know that it is a whole NEM thing and all that which we won’t get into the weeds on that…x
Jeff
I’ll tell you what the the utilities will tell you. They’ll say, oh, we can build solar for a dollar a watt in the desert, and that’s true, they can. But what they don’t tell you is how many dollars a watt it takes to build that transmission and distribution.
Ron
I know there’s no simple answer because it depends on the distance and all that, but in terms of dollar per watt that the consumer pays or that it actually costs, whichever way you want to look at it, once it gets into the consumer’s home, whether it comes from the desert or from the rooftop, there’s a certain cost to it. Are you saying that it’s cheaper if it was on my roof?
Jeff
Yes. Essentially what we’re seeing is electricity demand is skyrocketing, with electrification of homes, businesses and vehicles, so as we see more and more electricity required, the grid is woefully underprepared to expand. And it’s so expensive to put in new high-voltage transmission lines, and distribution infrastructure is so expensive to string that stuff through the neighborhoods, so you really would be best served by bringing more and more roofs online, with bringing power in to the home, to reduce the burden of all this extra electric stuff that we’re getting, like electric vehicles, which consume a lot.
Ron
Okay, so we’re here in California, with a Democratic-controlled legislature, we’ve had a Democratic governor for god knows how long. Jerry Brown – even Arnold Schwarzenegger – was very big on solar and environmentalism and so on. We’re getting right into the politics here, and this is part of your CALSSA work, the lobbying organization, the California Solar and Solar Storage Association – which, just full disclosure, my daughter works for CALSSA as the marketing director. Why were they not able to convince Governor Newsom and the legislature and so on to overrule the utilities on the whole big battle about, without getting into the details, about how much consumers get paid for the electricity they generated?
Jeff
Well, the utilities – PG&E in particular – and the the unions are in a marketing agreement to work together to stamp out competition, essentially rooftop solar being that competition. So, essentially, their campaign contributions to Governor Newsom and several other key legislators have been significant. In fact they are the number one political…
Ron
So it’s just a matter of money, and that’s how they’re getting their campaigns paid for.
Jeff
They’ve got the money to spend and they are smart. They’ve been entrenched utilities. For goodness sakes, they have all of the political connections by nature of the many decades of being a monopoly power provider for one of the most populated parts of the world.
Ron
Well, okay, and then on the other side, there’s a whole bunch of people that are very, very strongly advocates of solar, including solar home owners and people who are using it and buying it, and they are a powerful force. I’m one of them. You’re one of them, of course. You’re in Arizona. So it’s just a matter of the big power, they’re more powerful, in terms of the final decision, then the populace. Is that what happened in a nutshell?
Jeff
Well, and we like to think of our country as a representative democracy, but the reality is that we are a country that has a political system that allows special interest groups to fund campaigns that go against the public.
Ron
That’s such a frustrating fact that always kills me to think about.
And that kind of gets into our Fly part of this where we talk about bigger issues. But let me ask you one more, maybe a good connecting question: what do you see as the role of solar in particular, and renewable energy in general, in battling climate change and ecological devastation and destruction? How big a role is it, or is it just a nice thing to have but we really need to focus on … well, we obviously do need to focus on other elements as well, but what place does solar and renewable play in the battle against climate change?
Jeff
I feel based on all that I’ve seen over the years I have been working in this arena – and even prior to that, just my general industrial interactions – I feel solar seems to be the most cost-effective, environmentally friendly way to generate electricity. It’s not the only method that needs to be utilized, but it seems to be one of the best, if not the best, for many parts of the country.
Ron
There’s a lot of people, including some environmentalists, who say that until we can transition fully to renewable, that we need to use nuclear to stop the oil from going into the air. What are you on nuclear? What are your feelings on that?
Jeff
Well, nuclear is just not a very practical strategy because of the massive amount of time it takes to design and permit and build and yeah, it’s just impractical. Plain and simple. Solar can be deployed really quickly. Essentially, the technology is pretty simple.
I would say again, I don’t see nuclear as a very easy solution. I’d be probably okay with it but I think the challenge is that nuclear is so much more expensive than people realize. So I just kind of don’t think that it’s.
Ron
You don’t think it’s going to have a renaissance.
Jeff
I don’t think so, no. But I also feel that there needs to be a recognition that, while you can get solar to generate your electricity, if you consume energy, electricity wastefully, then you’re not being really sensible. I think that, by and large, mankind around the world needs to be conscientious that frivolous use of electricity – buying a huge monster SUV that’s an electric vehicle – doesn’t make you environmentally friendly. It just means that you’ve got an electric vehicle that’s really an energy hog. Electric vehicles can be energy hogs.
Ron
Hogging energy. It doesn’t really matter where it’s coming from if you are using it more than you have to. Let’s move into the bigger picture issues here, and we’ll start with global warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it. A lot of scientists and environmentalists and so on who say we’re already past the tipping point, it’s too late. We should have acted 30, 40, 20, at least 10, 5 years ago. In the meantime, emissions keep going up, the soil keeps getting abused. In other words, the ongoing ecological devastation, destruction, whatever noun you want to use, is going on. It doesn’t seem to be abating much at all. Maybe there’s exceptions. I’m sure there are. But are we past the tipping point? What do you think, Jeff? Do we still have hope of turning this temperature down on this planet?
Jeff
I don’t know. What I will say is… I certainly thought a lot about these kinds of questions throughout my life. I told people I never had kids, so it just gives me a lot of time to think. As I’ve thought about these things. I think my solution to the angst that’s caused by not being able to understand what the future holds is I became a Dudeist, which I think a lot of people feel to be a bit of a comical.…
Ron
Well, it’s because it came from a comedy.
Jeff
Well, yeah, so Dudeism is a religion that was started out of the movie The Big Lebowski, which is about Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski, a kind of a guy who just takes it easy and doesn’t really have a lot going on, like he’s content
Ron
Great movie, by the way.
Jeff
He’s very at peace with the universe, and essentially what this did was spawn what I think at first was kind of half-joking, but essentially the basic principle is to take into consideration Jeff Lebowski’s –the Dude’s – outlook on the world, and that really is akin to what’s called Taoism.
Taoism is, of course, an ancient Eastern philosophy. I wouldn’t call it religion so much. It allows you to understand your place in the universe, and so whenever I’ve thought about these really big issues, I just tend to look at what my role is in the universe and I’ve come to peace with what my role is and what I’m able to do and what I’m unable to do and I try to make a positive contribution in the work that I do.
I do a lot of volunteer work, but I do it with the hopes that it will help the world overcome the energy problems that it has, and it’s given me at least some personal satisfaction that the work that I’m doing while I’m alive will kind of build karma points. I just don’t want to lay on my deathbed and think that my life didn’t matter, and prior to giving it to solar, that’s the way I felt, but thankfully solar’s allowed me now to feel like I’m doing something worthwhile.
Ron
You know it’s interesting. What comes to mind, Jeff, is … this started by me asking you what you thought the chances were of humanity turning the corner on all these things that are destructive. We were starting with global warming and you went right into Dudeism, and the personal inner approach, call it spiritual, religious, whatever you want to call it, but personal, inward.
And I see, you know I follow all this stuff and I’m a pretty spiritual guy myself in my own way, and I see a lot of people who are real activists out there badmouthing that approach, like, oh, that’s just a way of escaping and zoning out.
But you’re actually a really good example of exactly the opposite. What you just said, your work is all about promoting a healthy lifestyle, and I know you personally so I know about how you feel about conservation, sustainability, et cetera. I guess I’m making the point that having a way of being at peace with everything doesn’t mean that you’ve given up on working on it, and in fact it probably makes you a whole lot more effective.
Jeff
I work like crazy. I work all the time. I’m trying to advance the cause of solar energy because I feel I can do that I’m in a position to be able to do it. I’m trying to take my capabilities and apply them in a way that’s going to be good for the future development.
Ron
Okay, I do want to broaden that beyond just environmental and solar and all that, and we’ve touched on it already. But what about again, in terms of ‘actionable wisdom for turbulent times’ – we’re in turbulent times in many, many ways. We’ve got authoritarianism rising around the world, not to mention even in our own so-called democracy I shouldn’t say so-called democracy, I’d call it a fledgling democracy. There’s the huge wealth gap. We’ve got billionaires flying into space while there are people starving. And there’s so many very difficult issues. I don’t know if there’s any of those that are particularly impactful for you that you feel you have something to share or want to, or … what are you most concerned about?
Jeff
I think, sustainability. I think that humanity needs to come to grips with the fact that everything we do, all our choices, throwing something in the garbage can, there’s an impact that that has on the planet around us. And if we continue to extract more out of the environment that we live in and all we do is throw away waste products that actually taint our environment, like carbon emissions, also plastics, for goodness sakes.
I think that there’s an awakening occurring when people are thinking it’s not just that plastic bottle that may never get recycled, but it’s the fact that it puts out these toxic chemicals…
Ron
It’s in our drinking water!
Jeff
Yeah. So I’d like to think that in the not too distant future, humanity will wake up about the concept of sustainability and that what we take out of the environment, we have to put back into the environment. If we continue to extract and not put back, we’re bankrupt.
Ron
So I completely agree, as do many people. And yet here we are, we continue to do it. What’s keeping us from implementing what seems to many of us, I would guess the majority, on this planet obvious, obvious stuff about wealth disparity, about sustainability, about not abusing the earth. But we’ve got such huge forces aligned against us: consumerism and advertising and big money and profit. What do we do? How can we break the hold that this big consumerist, corporate, whatever you want to call it mindset has on us in our individual lives and then as a society?
Jeff
I do feel that being politically aware is of civic responsibility. I learned that in high school, when they used to have a class called civics, and I don’t hear most people in the country that seem to believe that they have a civic responsibility. They have civic obligations as being a member of society.
Ron
How do we change?
Jeff
I’ve always been a strong believer in a good education system. Even though I don’t have any kids, I’ve always been a supporter in funding education properly. So you get good quality teachers, good quality schools and good quality education. I think that what we’ve seen is that if you, if these issues matter, then you have to get involved in politics at the local level.
Ron
I think that’s a real key thing.
Jeff
Yeah, I think a lot of people look at politics as just the national elections.
Ron
So I hear you and I feel guilty myself for never having been very involved. I’ve done work for nonprofits and such, but I’ve never gotten involved in local politics. And the forces that have? I mean the real strongly right-leaning people and powers. They figured this out some time ago and have taken over local governments and state legislatures and look what we’ve got.
Jeff
In some respects maybe not surprising, given humanity and history, and when you look at the way that things happen in the past, what we’re experiencing today. Certainly there’s a lot of parallels to past, historical events and so I guess the question is, is there any hope for humanity? And honestly, I don’t know. I would say that I, I’ve tried to and I don’t just try to… I definitely have this bigger perspective. I see that there is a universe out there, I see that my existence in that universe is absolutely insignificant. No matter what I do, good or bad, my impact on the universe as a whole is absolutely insignificant. But at the same token, I want to do what I can to try to make the world a better place for others while I’m here. While, in the overall scheme of things, I suspect that that all my efforts will not change the course of the universe, because universe is so vast. But maybe it’ll help.
Ron
It’s really an interesting contrast, isn’t it? To realize – it can either be crippling or sort of comforting – to realize that you’re just a spec on a vast universe that, as you say, has no real significance, and yet try to get out a bed in the morning and have some significance. It’s an interesting contrast that we live with.
Jeff
Because because I want to help people that deserve to be helped. I guess you could say it’s a selfish perspective, because the people that I am able to help, when they demonstrate their gratitude, it’s a really heartwarming experience.
Ron
It is, and you suggest your help is … to use the cliche helping an elderly person across the street. Every little bit helps, and not only helps there, it spreads. People see what you. People are moved by kindness, acts of kindness, to do so themselves.
I remember once having a realization along these lines years ago. I realized just what you said, how incredibly small, infinitesimally small part of the world, let alone the universe that I am. And yet, at the same time, I felt empowered because I realized I was connected to all of that. I’m a small part of it, but I’m connected to the whole, and this means there’s some power – I don’t know if ‘power’ is the right word, peace and power together – in realizing that, that, yes, you’re small, but you’re connected. So the more you realize and act on that connectedness, the more your influence ripples out.
Jeff
And I have very modest expectations. I do not have the anticipation that I’ll be a famous person. I don’t have the desire for any kind of fame whatsoever. I just wanted to do what I can to help the people that I care about, the people that are around me. There are customers, the people that work for our company. I want to do what I can to help those people because I like them and I care about them and I’m gonna do the best that I can to help them and help the solar industry succeed, because I think that solar energy does have real potential for helping future generations.
Ron
You know, Jeff, I think you just landed, in terms of my four-part structure of the ground, focus, fly and land. You just … I think that’s it. You do what you can and you find a philosophy that allows you to accept the world as it is it, yet work on changing the world where you can. And not to be buttering you up or anything, or but you’re a good example of that. You found your peace in your Dudeism and whatever else, and knowing that you’re just a small part of the grand picture, and yet you’re out there every day working on something that helps the planet. So congratulations.
Jeff
I feel my advice for others is, like I did, try to identify what you’re good at, what you like to do. Try to also identify we’re not a good at what you don’t like to do. And then, when you figure out what you’re good at and you like to do, do it to the best your ability and try to make a positive contribution to the world around you. And I think you know what a positive contribution is. And and if you’re not doing that, then volunteer time, get politically engaged. Just go out there and do random acts of kindness.
Ron
The world around you, immediately around you, not necessarily the whole world, and that’s… I think not having grandiose visions, which is something I have been susceptible my whole life, in terms of thinking I might have some bigger impact and all that, but it’s so important to realize…I mean, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, as long as you are… you can think globally as long as you are acting locally. The key is to be kind to your family and the people around you and do what you say and live with integrity, all the things that people pretty much agree on.
That’s one of the things that’s always been frustrating to me, that the great majority of humanity knows what it means to be a good person, and most people are good people, but we don’t have very good leadership, and it’s my view. I mean overall, there’s no general statement about that, but if we’re gonna have any chance of making it, it seems to me, we’re gonna need to get some kind of enlightened, more enlightened leadership to to make these big decisions that affect us all profoundly.
Jeff
I think that humanity bears some responsibility for getting off their butts and putting down their iPhones and doing a little real-world work and interaction with others.
I think that many people are complacent, figure that everybody else is gonna solve the world’s problems. That’s just not the way it is. If you’re not making an active contribution you’re part of the problem.
Ron
Yeah, that’s for sure. Do you have any thoughts you want to close with?
Jeff
Well, I would just say that it took me the better part of 50 years actually… in my 50s, I finally came to peace with the universe around me. It was a long process to get to that point, and I was very happy when I finally did kind of realize that the secret to life is all the small stuff, none of the big stuff. All the small stuff is what matters most.Your day-to-day mundane life that you know. I go out my backyard, I have a garden, I pick some lemons, I work on some plants, and it’s just that experience that makes life what it is. So don’t underestimate the wonderful things that we all have in our life every day. It’s just we all tend to get immune to how special those uneventful moments are in our life, and if we pay more attention to them, then I think you can get a lot more satisfaction.
Ron
Well, that sounds like actionable wisdom to me. So let’s call it a day, and thanks for this interview and for your very forthright discussion about things and.
Jeff
Well, Ron, thank you for having me on your new podcast and I wish you well with it.
—- music
Ron
Okay, I’m going to jump in here where I had originally thought would be the end of the episode, and instead reposition here the few minutes of discussion that Jeff and I had about the movie that he and Jason Vetterli are producing, Solar Roots – the Pioneers of PV. By the way, “PV” stands for photovoltaics, which is the official term for electricity generated by light. And then I’ll say a few closing words of my own about the film. So here’s our discussion.
Ron
Okay, that’s as much introduction as I need to give you. Tell us about that project, Jeff.
Jeff
Yeah, so the documentary film is called Solar Roots – the Pioneers of PV. And it was just a really wonderful experience, having the opportunity to go around and meet these pioneers of the industry in their home locations and learn a little bit about how they first brought that solar to their customers. So we started the project in 2015. We we did all the interviews up through 2017, at which point we showed the draft version of the film, and we’ve been working on it ever since. Covid obviously had some impact and we’re closing in on the final public release version, which will be given away for free. And it’s it’s a really wonderful experience.
Ron
It is. I’ve seen it.
Jeff
It’s a wonderful story, it’s entertaining, I think. it’s, but even though there’s no doubt about it. If you don’t know anything about solar power, I think it’s still an entertaining story.
Ron
It is. I’ve been in a theater least once, if not twice, where it has been shown, and everybody loved it. It’s a really interesting human interest story as well, as you say, the roots of solar, a lot of stuff that if we had more time we could get into more of.
Jeff
Yeah, it’s a fun story, it has some unusual scandalous elements to it and it’s also, I think, inspiring to help bring attention to those individuals that brought this technology down from space into homes around the world, and how it’s really helped transform the way that we humans think about energy.
Ron
And people that were very dedicated to the kind of things we’ve been talking about sustainability and ecology, doing the small things. And these are people that were just passionate about it and curious. A lot of curiosity that just went into this. They didn’t get into it for the money.
Jeff
Well, some of them made a bunch of money in the end, but you’re right, they did not do it for the money. They did it for a very practical, functional reason, because they needed power in the back country. It was the cost-effective way to get power in the middle of nowhere and it turned into the industry that we have today. And there’s so many great stories.
Ron
So when it comes to the theater near you, tell people again what is it called.
Jeff
Well, may not come to the theater near you, because we’re gonna give away for free.
Ron
OK, to a screen near you.
Jeff
But yes, the name of the film is Solar Roots – the Pioneers of PV. I hope folks have a chance to see it in the not too distant future. If all goes well later this year it should be ready.
Ron
Say a bit about how you are gonna get it out there. What’s your distribution? Do you know?
Jeff
We’ll likely be putting it up for free on Vimeo. We want the world to be able to see this film and just let it spread by word of mouth. Yeah, I think it will get a viewership because it is entertaining. I think inside the industry and I think even outside the industry. It’s a feel-good story.
Ron
It is. And not just feel good, it’s really interesting. I learned a lot and I was in the solar industry.
___
Ron
Okay, so that was our discussion of Jeff and Jason’s film Solar Roots, and I repositioned it here to the end of the episode because I want to emphasize what a great accomplishment this documentary is. I think Jeff is being a little too humble about it. The solar industry has become a major part of our economy and, in all likelihood, will remain a rapidly growing component of our energy supply for many decades. And to my knowledge, and Jeff confirms this as well, Solar Roots is the only video or film documentary that covers its early history and founding.
You’ll meet some amazing characters. I was fortunate in my years in the solar industry in the early 2000s to have met and gotten to know many of them myself. They’re a truly committed bunch of good-hearted, bright, funny, engaging folks with great stories to tell from those pioneering days. So be sure to check it out, you won’t be sorry.
You can get more information about the film, including a great nine-minute trailer that’s on the site right now, at their website, which is solar roots dot com. That’s actually solar hyphen roots dot com, solar hyphen roots dot com. Jeff and Jason will keep it up to date with the latest news on its release and you can sign up to get the email about that.
Okay, I said that I’d explain the episode title, Jeff Spies: The Solar Dude Abides. Explain it to those of you who are not familiar with the movie The Big Lebowski, which is a great film. The title character of the movie, Jeff Lebowski, played by Jeff Bridges, goes by the nickname ‘the Dude’ in the movie. And the signature phrase of the film’s message, the theme by which the Dude lives, is “the Dude abides.” It’s become quite a well-known phrase in the culture and it means in a nutshell that Jeff Lebowski goes with the flow. And I get a kick out of how Jeff Lebowski is played by Jeff Bridges and the associated philosophy is now adopted by Jeff Spies. So maybe we could call dudeism Jeffism.
—- music
That concludes the second episode of the Wise Talkers podcast. Thanks for listening. Be sure to check out the website wisetalkers.com for all the latest information on the podcast. All the episodes will be published there under the Episodes link in the top menu. You’ll also find in the top menu a link to Subscribe to Wise Talkers, which is the best way to plug into the podcast. And Wise Talkers is also listed on Apple and Spotify and Google and most of the other podcast directories, and, of course, you can follow there too if you wish, which would be great!
Thanks for tuning in to Wise Talkers and I hope we’ll see you again here soon.