I worked in (small) wind when I was young. That's when I got hooked. I carved my first blade on a picnic table for fun one day. Put it up on a mast on the peak of our barn and watched it spin. It was there for years.
I used to read Popular Mechanics/Science, and one day I read this article about the NASA program, and how they were using these new, space-age solar panels to convert light to electricity. They had a picture of one. It was about 20 watts and cost $1,800 IIRC. I thought...this is going to change the world. I was right...it just has taken a little longer than I'd expected.
I started experimenting with RE more and more. We started seeing/selling some rotary inverters at work. My first inverter was a hoot. It was 12V and used about 20amps just to light the damn thing up. It also cropped the screen of a small TV. Still, I was proud because cobbled up a latching circuit to turn it on from multiple sources.
As crazy as it all seems, I now work for a small, rural Coop. I'm still off-grid. And guess what, solar has taken off, we're looking seriously at distributed storage, and new 'electro-technologies' (like cold-climate heat pumps, induction evaporators - for sugar-makers, EV charging...and I thought I was just out there. Well, okay I am, but so are you if you're reading ;>]
~ks