Some time ago I came across this group of people who were trying to start Solar Mosaic, on the Internet. Solar Mosaic is a new platform, for crowdfunding of solar energy projects, for community purposes, in the United States. ("Community" seems to mean most any kind of non-profit, including school buildings, community centers, etc., as well as "small businesses.") This evening I received an emailed announcement from them, and I post it here because some KFs may be interested in checking out Solar Mosaic's site or Facebook page.
Dear Friends, Family, Heroes, and the greater Solar Mosaic community,
We hope this message finds you well.
We've been working on Solar Mosaic for almost a year and a half (intensively for about 9 months) to create a simple way for anyone to go solar. We're building a platform where anyone can create and crowdfund (raise the money from their community and online) community solar projects. These are solar projects on schools, places of worship, small-businesses, community centers and non-profits. It turns out there are lots of complicated regulations and barriers to doing this, but we've found a model we think will work well for now and will be something to build on.
Friday night we launched our first project -- a city-wide series of projects in Oakland with the Ella Baker Center, Rebuild the Dream, Sungevity and Solar For All -- to a jam-packed auditorium at Power Shift '11. First, Van Jones made the announcement at the beginning of his keynote. Then our President, Billy Parish, followed him and told a little more about the story. We gave everyone in the audience beautiful, square business card 'Tiles' and invited them to imagine their dream community solar project. A Tile is a $100 share of a community solar project. The Tiles come together to build the Solar Mosaic.
As big as this all felt, it's just the first step.
For now, when you get a minute, please just check out:
www.solarmosaic.com and give us some love in the comments boxes (particularly on Solar Mosaic's Oakland page: ) and 'like' us on Facebook:. If you'd like to be one of the first people to go solar by buying Tiles, you're also obviously welcome to do that too.
In any case, please please please send us feedback -- is something not working? is something unclear? is there an opportunity we should focus on or someone we should talk to?
To be honest, it’s been an awesome challenge bringing this vision to reality. We love a good challenge and having a supportive community to turn to has made all the difference. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.
The future looks bright.
Best,
Dan, Billy, Arthur and the Solar Mosaic team
