Nestled in the Rogue Valley, in the Shale City area behind Grizzly Peak outside Ashland, Oregon, the story of Roots Power's founder began not with a wrench in hand, but with a question. It was 1996, and RJ Satava was living on an off-grid goat farm, the guest of two women who had built a self-sufficient homestead out of sun, water, and sheer will. There, for the first time, he watched solar panels and a small hydro system turn wind, light, and gravity into something a household could actually run on. It was a beautiful life — just not, he realized, his own. It belonged to the women who'd built it. If he ever wanted a homestead like it, he'd have to build one himself.
So he left. With little more than a trade-honed work ethic and a head full of half-formed plans, he pointed himself toward Humboldt County, drawn by a university program built around the exact questions the goat farm had raised in him. In the fall of 1998, he enrolled at Humboldt State University — now Cal Poly Humboldt — in Environmental Resource Engineering. Three years in, the program's civil-engineering backbone had pulled him far from the renewable-energy coursework he'd actually come for, so he did what he'd keep doing throughout his career: he found a way around the obstacle instead of accepting it. Working with a department chair, he built his own path through the curriculum and graduated with a B.S. in Environmental Science Technology: Renewable Power Systems, with a minor in Appropriate Technology.
Understanding how to generate power was one thing; a homestead also needed someone who could get that power safely where it needed to go. So RJ set his sights on the electrical trade — and on one contracting outfit in particular. Turned away because they weren't hiring, he caught wind that the owner of that very company was about to start teaching the wiring course at the local community college. He signed up immediately, sat in that classroom, and made sure he'd be first in line the moment a position opened. Sure enough, a spot opened not long after the semester began, and 2003–2004 became his first year as a working electrician. Two years and a Journeyman card later, he gave the notice everyone had seen coming, struck out on his own, and by 2006 had earned his contractor's license — the foundation on which he built a new company: Roots Power.
What followed was years of showing up — for customers, for the community, for other contractors who came to know his name. His background in renewable energy and off-grid systems turned out to be more than a personal passion; in a county where off-grid living wasn't a lifestyle choice so much as a necessity for the underground economy Humboldt had quietly built its reputation on, RJ became the electrician people called when the grid wasn't an option. Business was steady and the connections real and lasting, until that economy eventually cooled and the work shifted with it.
Through it all, RJ had stayed close to the mentor who'd first put him on a crew. So when that mentor called to say he was leaving his teaching post at the community college, RJ did what he'd done once before: he went after the opportunity. Since 2017, he's taught the college's state-approved Electrician Trainee Program as Associate Faculty — and in the spring of 2026, after quietly lobbying for the position for years, he landed it full-time as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. Student retention in his core wiring classes has tripled since that first semester.
RJ still calls himself a scientist at heart, and between the trade and the teaching, he's found more than he ever set out looking for in Humboldt. The homestead that first pulled him here, though — that one's still out there, a dream deferred but never forgotten. Thank you, Humboldt.