They eventually ended up with a giant black array of panels, located well down the hill from their house. Next to the panels, one live oak casts a bit of shade on the huge array, but Gabrielle won't let Ken cut down that tree to make the system more efficient. In this, as with every other ecological choice, there are always trade-offs. But as their Web site brags: "No oak trees were harmed in the process."

The Adelmans say that even though their system cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, the combination of their large power demands -- charging up their fleet of electric cars increased the cost of their electricity bills to $1,000 a month before they built their solar power system -- and skyrocketing energy prices would have ensured that they could have paid off the costs of the system in nine and a half years.

That is, if they hadn't had to fight the local power utility to get the system up and running. The problem was net-metering on the scale that the Adelmans demanded. PG&E refused to permit the practice -- in which excess power from the Adelmans' house was contributed to the grid -- for a system capable of generating more than 10 kilowatts. Even though California was in the throes of a massive power crisis at the time, the power company balked.

"PG&E doesn't want any competition," says Gabrielle, flatly.

California had recently raised the allowable limit for residential homes from 10 kilowatts to 1 megawatt, but the Adelmans soon found their system caught up in a blizzard of red tape. PG&E threatened to charge them $605,000 for upgrades to the local power distribution system to make interconnection to the grid feasible. (Ultimately the utility only charged $11,000.)

The pushback galvanized the Adelmans. "Whether I was just the first applicant of a system over 10 kw, or whether they somehow picked me out special for this treatment, was unknown to me, but a battle they wanted, and a battle I was going to give them," writes Ken on his Web site. "Besides, I had nothing to lose -- the solar system was already constructed and ready for operation."

"There are a lot of people who don't have the resources to fight back," says Gabrielle. But they did.

The summer of 2001 marked the high-water point of the California power crisis. PG&E declared bankruptcy, and Californians were being scolded to turn off lights and do laundry at off-peak times to avoid rolling blackouts. As Ken remembers on his Web site: "Pacific Gas & Electric was bankrupt from having to pay outrageous wholesale prices for peak-time power, and here I was willing to give them peak-time power in exchange for kilowatts that they would deliver to me at 2 a.m. to charge my cars. They were acting not just against the best interest of the public, but seemingly against their own best interest!" When local media stories in the San Jose Mercury News and the Santa Cruz Sentinel broke, the power company temporatily capitulated, approving the system. But then it revoked that approval just days later, forcibly disconnecting the Adelmans' house, putting them effectively off the grid. The Adelmans ended up spending months engaged in costly dickering before the Public Utilities Commission, before finally bending PG&E to their will.

Today, the Adelmans generate so much electrical power that they host Web servers for their friends for free just to use some of the excess. Their goal: At the end of the year they want to have the amount they've fed back to the grid during the peak hours during the day balance out exactly the amount they've used at night charging up their electric cars. Although PG&E will charge the Adelmans at year's end if they've consumed more power than they've generated, the company won't allow them to roll over any positive credit from year to year.

The Adelmans now live a lifestyle that few can claim to emulate, literally driving and living with sunlight. It's a shame that as yet there are no electric helicopters available for their use in taking photos for their Coastal Records Project. But as they point out on the project's Web site, the Robinson R44 helicopter they fly gets about 13 miles per gallon, "approximately the same as most SUVs on the road today."

"We're aware that we burn fossil fuels operating our helicopter, and sincerely believe that the environmental good that will come from this project far outweighs the bad," they write. "Furthermore, we have almost completely eliminated our use of fossil fuels in our terrestrial transportation by driving electric cars which we charge using our photovoltaic solar system."

Can the average Californian duplicate the example of the Adelmans, without the benefit of having sold a technology start-up right before the dot-com crash? It's possible, with a little help from the government. The California Legislature is currently considering a bill to help Californians -- and not just the wealthy, technocratic elite -- embrace solar technology without having to fight the power company to pull it off, by mandating that solar power be built into new construction.

"Thousands of homes are being built in California every year, and they're being built without solar power, and we think that's a missed opportunity," says Bernadette Del Chiano, an energy advocate for Environment California, a nonprofit group that is lobbying for the legislation. "We should start to build solar in as a standard feature on new homes where it makes sense."

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