Features

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a series about people and businesses that make things in Berkeley. 

The economy’s in trouble, but at Sun Light & Power on Folger Avenue, business is booming. The firm, one of the East Bay’s leading solar energy companies, doubled the size of its workforce to 23 in the past year. And while residential installation has been and remains its main gig, the company just won contracts to outfit the City of Berkeley’s Corporation Yard and Willard Swimming Pool with solar panels. 

Gary Gerber, Sun Light & Power’s founder and president, is not surprised that he’s prospering in the midst of a downturn. “My company has actually been on an anti-economy trend ever since we started,” he says, looking back on Sun Light & Power’s 28-year history. “When the economy isn’t doing as well, we usually do better.” 

That’s because it usually takes a jolt to get people to face questions like how are we going to meet our energy needs when we run out of cheap oil and natural gas? As long as energy is cheap, it’s easy to evade that question. It’s only when costs climb that people start looking for alternatives. 

“Most people can see the writing on the wall,” says Sun Light & Power designer and salesperson Doug Sorenberger. “They realize that our energy costs are going to go up, what with PG&E’s bankruptcy and the Enron scandal. As ratepayers, we’re going to shoulder the burden of the costs of deregulation.” But in the long run, which is getting shorter and shorter, even a regulated market wouldn’t prevent a steep rise in the cost of energy, simply because the earth’s supplies of fossil fuels are running out. Sun Light & Power staff hand out a copy of a 1998 Scientific American article by two oil industry consultants that predicts that global production of conventional oil will begin to decline by 2008. 

Solar energy is clean, quiet and, as long as the sun shines, renewable. The State of California offers both a tax credit on solar installations that amounts to 7.5 percent on the value of the system and, through the California Energy Commission, a rebate on a per-watt basis. According to Sorenberger, on a typical house the rebate is $8,500. That’s the best deal available from any state. These incentives can save homeowners up to half the cost of a solar system. 

Sun Light & Power installs about a hundred residential solar systems a year, mostly in Berkeley and Oakland. These units, consisting of solar modules, also known as photovoltaic or PV modules, are mounted on a roof facing south. The solid-state modules silently convert sunlight into electricity. The systems installed by Sun Light & Power have a capacity of 2,000-6,000 watts and generate between eight and 30 kilowatt hours a day. The cost of a typical home solar installation after the rebate ranges from $12,000 to $40,000, with an average of about $18,500. That sounds like a lot of money, but think of it in terms of your PG&E bill for years to come. 

“The conundrum with alternative energy,” observes Gary Gerber, “is the long view versus the short. In the long view, it’s always less expensive to go this way. If you buy a solar electric system, it’s like you’re prepaying for a good 30 years in one payment. You’re done. Let’s say that number is $25,000. That’s going to offset $75,000 to $100,000 worth of energy bills over the next 30 years.” 

Homes with solar systems remain connected to the utility grid, but they have a unique “buy/sell” relationship with the utility company. Under the “net-metering” program, on a sunny day, when energy demands are low and a home’s solar modules produce more electricity than the household uses, the meter runs backwards, effectively “selling” extra electricity to the utility company and creating an “energy credit.” Alternately, when the household uses power, the electric meter runs forward, using up the energy credit. The net result of installing a PV system is that homeowners purchase less electricity or none at all from the utility company. 

Gerber credits his success in part to the sophistication of his customers, people who’ve run the numbers far into the future and recognized that solar energy is going to save them money. They’re also people who are willing and able to do the right thing. 

Sun Light & Power helps them do it by taking care of all the paperwork and footwork. “All we ask the customer to do,” says Doug Sorenberger, “is to sign the checks and the contracts. We handle the permitting. I go get the permits myself. We have a woman in our shop who is a rebate specialist who deals with the California Energy Commission. We have engineers on staff. We’re a one-stop shop for solar.” 

If Gary Gerber has his way, Sun Light & Power will be a one-stop shop for all of his customers’ energy needs. Gerber talks about what he calls the Complete Energy Solution. “What I want to do,” he says, “is enable people to get completely off fossil fuel. That’s totally doable now. It’s even affordable.” 

Sun Light & Power practices what Gerber preaches. “We’re trying to be the model right here of all the things we’re talking about...We’re just completing the installation of our own biodiesel boiler. We run our vehicles on the biodiesel, we rerun an electric vehicle off the photovoltaics, we run our whole office off the solar electricity, we heat our office with the biodiesel, and we use the biodiesel boiler to make the biodiesel fuel out of used [cooking] oil” collected from local restaurants. “The only thing we don’t have here is the radiant heating, because we don’t own the building.” 

Gerber moved Sun Light & Power from Pt. Richmond to Berkeley in 1981. Now ready to be his own landlord, he says that keeping a Berkeley address is a must. “Berkeley is the only logical place for us to be….The city epitomizes what we’re all about: forward-thinking alternatives to the status quo.” And it’s companies like Sun Light & Power that keep Berkeley one step ahead of business as usual. 

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