The Goods on Real Goods
For over 30 years Real Goods has led the Sustainable Living market through sustainable lifestyle products, education and expert solar installation. Many of the people in the solar industry today got their start by taking classes at our Solar Living Center, or by reading the Solar Living Sourcebook. We have a rich and vibrant history pioneering this industry, and we plan to continue making history as innovations take solar to newer and loftier heights.
Who Put the “Real” in Real Goods
As did many of his contemporaries in the 1960s and early 1970s, John Schaeffer, founder of Real Goods, experimented with an alternative lifestyle. After graduating from U.C. Berkeley in 1971, he moved to a commune called “Rainbow” outside of Boonville, California. There, in an isolated 290-acre mountain community, John pursued a picturesque life of enlightened self-sufficiency.
Despite the idyllic surroundings, John soon found that certain key elements of life were missing. After several years of reading bedtime stories to his children by the flickering light of a kerosene lamp, John began to squint. He grew tired of melted ice cream and lukewarm beer. He began to miss the creature comforts his family was lacking due to their “off-the-grid” lifestyle. He yearned for just a tiny amount of energy to strike a balance between the lifestyle he had grown up with and complete deprivation. John came to the realization that self-sufficiency was much more appealing as a concept than a reality.
Then he discovered 12-volt power. John hooked up an extra battery to his car that he charged while commuting to work, with just enough juice to power lights, a radio, and the occasional television broadcast. Despite his departure from a pure ascetic lifestyle, each and every time that Saturday Night Live aired, John’s home became the most popular place on the commune. Eventually, when the 12-hour community workdays began to take their toll, John took a job as a computer operator in Ukiah, some 35 twisty miles from Boonville.
Once the word got out that John would be making the trek over the mountain to the “big city” daily, he became a one-man pick-up and delivery service, procuring the wood stoves, fertilizer, chicken wire, bone meal, gardening seeds, tools, and supplies needed for the commune. As a conscientious and naturally frugal person, John spent hours scrutinizing the hardware stores and home centers of Ukiah, searching for the best deals on the real goods needed for the communards’ close-to-the-earth lifestyle.
One day, while driving his VW bug back to the commune after a particularly vexing shopping trip, a thought occurred to John. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he mused, “if there was one store that sold all the products needed for independent, off-the-grid living, and sold them at fair prices?” The idea of Real Goods was born. The company thrived opening up retail stores and eventually morphed into a mail-order company and later into the nation’s largest purveyor of solar system installations.
From its humble beginnings in 1978, Real Goods became a Real Business, with Real Employees serving Real Customers. The company now can lay claim to the title of the Oldest and Largest catalog firm devoted to the sale and service of renewable energy products in the world. Early on, John managed to turn his personal commitment to right livelihood into company policy, pioneering the concept of a socially conscious and environmentally responsible business. The company consistently has been honored and awarded for its ethical and environmental business standards. Plaudits include Corporate Conscience Awards (from the Council on Economic Priorities); inclusion in Inc. magazine’s 1993 list of America’s 500 Fastest- Growing Companies; three consecutive Robert Rodale Awards for Environmental Education; Northern California Small Business of the Year Winner for 1994; finalist for Entrepreneur of the year two years running; news coverage in Time, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and Mother Earth News; numerous TV appearances, countless Japanese magazines; and many thick scrapbooks full of press clippings.
Own Your Power
In late 1978 after Real Goods was born, a guy from Los Angeles showed up in a Porsche full of solar photovoltaic panels at the Willits store. This was a real sight as no one in Willits or Northern California for that matter had never seen nor heard of PV panels. John, on a lark, bought 100 of these 9 watt PV panels for about $600 each and ended up selling them for $900 each or $100 per watt at retail – a shocking price considering today they go for well less than $5/watt. In than fall 1978, Real Goods quickly became the very first company in the world to sell solar PV panels at retail. It wasn’t that it was the cheapest technology, but it was the ONLY technology to bring electricity to the every burgeoning off-the-grid refugees settling in Mendocino County. The good news was all the hippies in the hills had power and could now stop squinting to their kerosene lamps. An industry was born, but it took another 20 years for it to take shape. Between 1978 and 1998, solar was still unheard of and still too expensive. It wasn’t until the late ‘90s or early ‘00s that net metering took hold and the utilities saw the writing on the wall and decided that solar was a force to be reckoned with. As of 2009 Real Goods has installed over 6,000 solar systems on houses primarily in California and Colorado and provide off-the-grid solar to over 100,000 homes worldwide.
Living the Dream: The Real Goods Solar Living Center
Imagine a destination where ethical business is conducted daily amidst a diverse and bountiful landscape, where the gurgle of water flowing through its naturally revitalizing cycle heightens your perception of these ponds, these gardens, and these living sculptures. You follow the sensuous curve of the hill and lazy meanders of the watercourse to a structure of sweeping beauty, where floor-to-ceiling windows and soaring architecture clearly proclaim this building’s purpose—to take every advantage of the power of the sun throughout its seasonal phases.
A few more steps and the spidery legs of a water-pumping windmill come into view, and the top of a tree that looks as though it might be planted in the rusted shell of a vintage e Cadillac. An awesome sense of place begins to reveal itself to you. Inside the building, sunlight and rainbows play across the walls and floors of a 5,000-square-foot showroom, and you begin to understand that all of this, even the offices and cash registers, are powered by the energy of sun and wind. Welcome to the Solar Living Center in Hopland, California, the crowning achievement of the Real Goods mission.
The architect chosen to design the building was Sim Van der Ryn of the Ecological Design Institute of Sausalito, California. His associate, David Arkin, served as project architect, and Jeff Oldham of Real Goods managed the building of the project (both remain on the SLI’s board of directors). Their creation is a tall and gracefully curving single-story building that is so adept in its capture of the varying hourly and seasonal angles of the sun that additional heat and light are virtually unnecessary. Wood-burning stoves provide back-up heating for the coldest winter mornings and solar-powered fluorescent lighting is available, but is rarely used. Through a combination of overhangs and manually controlled hemp awnings, excess insulation during the hot-weather months has been avoided. Solar-powered evaporative coolers provide a low-energy alternative to air conditioning, and are also used to flush the building with cool night air, storing “coolth” in the 600 tons of thermal mass of the building’s walls, columns, and floor. Grape arbors and a central fountain with a “drip ring” for evaporative cooling are positioned along the southern exposure of the building to serve as a first line of defense against the many over-one-hundred-degree days that occur during the summer in this part of California.
Our Solar Living Center began as the vision of Real Goods founder and president, John Schaeffer. His dream was to create an oasis of biodiversity, where the company could demonstrate the culture and technology of solar living, where the grounds and structures were designed to embody the sustainable living philosophy of Real Goods’ catalogs and business. With the opening of the Solar Living Center in April 1996, John’s vision is now a reality. As of late 2009, over two and a half million people have visited the center, and have left this place with an overwhelming sense of inspiration and possibility
In 1998, the Real Goods Solar Living Institute split off from its parent Real Goods Trading Corporation and became a legal 501(c)(3) non-profit called the Solar Living Institute (SLI). Since then the SLI has nurtured and developed the 12-acre permaculture site that has flourished with fecundity.
Solar Living Source Book
The Solar Living Sourcebook printed its first edition in 1991 with the intent of providing a one-stop information source for renewable energy and sustainable living practices and products. The Sourcebook, now in its 13th edition and having sold over 500,000 copies in over 44 English-speaking countries continues to be the ‘bible’ on renewable energy. It can be found behind the counters of all of Real Goods competitors and in the libraries of most renewable energy aficionados. The Sourcebook covers the philosophy and the justification for solar and renewable energy as well as the problems that unfettered use of fossil fuels has caused to our planet. But lots of books tell about “Why To.” The Sourcebook shines in its “How To” orientation. From buying your piece of paradise in the country, to developing rural roads and water systems, to permaculture and biodynamic farming, to chicken husbandry, installation of solar hot water and photovoltaic systems, the Sourcebook covers it all. The 13th edition has added a new chapter (at the end of course) on Natural Burial. To order a copy of the Solar Living Sourcebook in its latest edition, click HERE.
Real Goods in the New Millennium
In 2001 Real Goods merged with Gaiam of Boulder Colorado, a lifestyle media company focusing on yoga and mind, body, health products. The merger was a good one adding millions of potential new customers to Real Goods already burgeoning customer list. In 2002, Real Goods began to do solar installations and widened its footprint to include all of California and the Front Range in Colorado. Business was so successful, that Real Goods did its initial public offering (IPO) in early 2008, raising over $50 million to expand its solar capabilities. Real Goods acquired four solar companies in two years: Marin Solar, Carlson Solar, Independent Energy Systems, and Regrid Power. These companies were the best in their localities and the best installers in the state. Together these five companies integrated activities and rebranded as one Real Goods Solar with a new logo and integrated identity in 2009. Real Goods Solar has now installed more solar systems than any other company in the U.S. We are uniquely poised to be of superior service to our communities, and we look forward to making solar more accessible to everyone.
