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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The Adelmans are best known for their fight with Barbra Streisand. The chanteuse took exception to their nonprofit, Web-based conservation effort, the California Coastal Records Project. The CCRP documents the state's coastline from the Oregon to the Mexican border with more than 12,800 photos that the couple snapped from their personal aircraft. The goal is to maintain a permanent, publicly accessible physical record of the coast as a weapon against illegal development.
Streisand, whose sprawling Malibu estate appears in one of the photos, decided she didn't like her house, pool and backyard showing up online, so she sued the Adelmans and their Internet service provider for $10 million in May 2003, alleging invasion of privacy. Streisand did not prevail in court, however; a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ordered her to compensate the couple $177,107.54 in legal fees and court costs.
The spat with Streisand is really little more than a footnote to the Adelman's overriding passion: their commitment to alternative energy sources, solar power in particular. But the two things are connected: According to the Adelmans, their heavy use of fossil-fuel-burning airplanes and helicopters for their conservation project made them feel so guilty about their impact on the environment that they decided to compensate for their profligacy in other ways. So they went on an electric car buying frenzy.
Ken was skeptical at first, but found that as soon as he got behind the wheel of an electric car, "I was absolutely hooked." He's now convinced that electric cars aren't just better for the environment, "they're better cars." The hassle of charging them up at night seems minor to the Adelmans, especially compared to the effort of going to a gas station: "I don't have gas at my home. I only have electricity," quips Gabrielle.
The couple first leased two (now recalled) EV1s from General Motors. Then came the purchase of two Toyota RAV4 Electric Vehicles. Toyota no longer sells the RAV4, but the Adelmans have held on to theirs, along with an AC Propulsion tzero.
The Adelmans became so hooked on their electric cars that the battery in their Miata died from lack of use after they let the convertible sit in the garage for a month and a half. Now, says Gabrielle, they religiously start up their conventional cars every month, whether they want to drive them or not.
U.S. automakers may have largely abandoned electric cars, but the Adelmans predict that Chinese auto manufacturers will take up the slack, given that nation's surging production of consumer electronics, and rising middle-class demand for cars.
But even as the Adelmans became evangelists for electric cars, they kept hearing a common objection from green-conscious skeptics. The cars might have zero noxious tailpipe emissions, but that didn't mean they were blame-free. "That just means that you're not polluting here,'" Ken says he was frequently told. "'Have you just moved the pollution to [the power plant at] Moss Landing?'"
The Adelmans reject the critique, arguing that generating electricity at a power plant is more efficient than fueling up individual cars at gas stations, particularly when one factors in the environmental impact of extracting, refining and transporting gasoline. There's also the benefit of not contributing to the financial and political costs of depending on foreign oil. Still, the Adelmans wanted to remove even the slightest stain of suspicion. They decided to reexamine the potential of solar power, a technology they'd considered for their home in 1998, but decided wasn't feasible in terms of cost or efficiency.
But by the early 2000s, the price of solar power technology had begun to fall significantly. In the intervening years, the Adelmans' move to electric cars had also dramatically increased their electricity use at home. The combination of the two factors started to mean that moving to solar would make financial sense, especially when one took advantage of California state subsidies for the use of the technology. There was one additional complication: The roof over their sprawling mansion juts up and down at varying terraced heights over different parts of the house, so a conventional rooftop system of solar panels wouldn't work. Nor did the Adelmans want to place the panels next to their house, because that would require chopping down native live oaks.
