How Jimbo Made a Solar Panel out of Coke cans and Giving the Six Trillion Dollar Renewable Energy Market to China

It was 1980 and I was shootin’ the breeze with Jimbo, a maintenance guy at Colorado State University in Fort Collins where I was enrolled. He motioned me over to his old Ford pickup. There in the full-size bed was a four by eight-foot wood box he had built out of two by six scrap lumber and plywood. Jimbo could pass for a mountain man and he always had a story to tell about his homestead in the foothills on the eastern slope just outside of town. He was standing…