Summary
"PG&E won't pay me for any surplus energy I create, and I can't sell energy to my tenants," he says. "So I spend the money to put the cells in and then I give the energy to PG&E. And then they sell it. I'm not puttin' that stuff on the roof, because I'm not leaving it behind when I go."
The state's initiative sparked a scramble for solar throughout the state. In 2000, California businesses and homeowners installed about 2,000 solar roofs; two years later, that number had grown to 4,500, according to [Bernadette Del Chiaro]. But 2006, the fattened rebate's first year, saw some 8,000 new solar systems statewide, and this year is on pace to beat that. "I think it's mostly just because of all the attention," Del Chiaro says. "The state government is saying, 'We want you to go solar; we want this to be cost-effective for you.'"Del Chiaro wagers that [Bradley Zeve]'s made a safe bet on solar. "It's not like a cell phone or a computer where the technology itself will be made obsolete in a few years," she says. "It's going to produce electrons for the next 30 years, and there's nothing within the grid or your toaster oven that's gonna change that."See the full content of this document
Extract
Power Shift
Bradley Zeve, perched on a hydraulic lift wobbling 20 feet off the ground, leans forward and looks out across the roof of our office. "Oh baby, you're so hot," he shouts. Then he turns and grins at me and three other Weekly staffers who are trapped with him on the elevated platform. Puns are a part of our business, but I can't suppress a groan. "I could go on," he says, still grinning, then turns back toward the roof. "You turn me on!"
I have to forgive him. Zeve, the Weekly's owner and CEO, is in that shocked-euphoric state people feel when they find out they're pregnant, buy a house, or take any other leap that commits them wholly to something big for a long time. He has just invested in a quarter-million-dollar array of photovoltaic cells now lining the building's flat tar-and-gravel roof. The way he sees it, he's financially married to them for the next 13 years. Hence the bad puns.It's Monday, April 23, and th...See the full content of this document
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