Sowing Light

I’m in Berkeley, and my old friend Dan Rosen has been gracious enough to show me around a bit. Dan is the CEO of Solar Mosaic – a young solar company on an interesting journey.

The development of Solar Mosaic is an example of what happens when passion and commitment lead the show. The company grew from a desire on the part of its co-founders – Rosen and Billy Parish – to enable and encourage solar in whatever ways they could.

At first, they crowd sourced no-interest loans for community solar projects. They put 28.8kW of solar panels on top of The Asian Resource Center in Oakland, and continued to do the same in a small handful of other community projects. As they waded into the field, they started to sense a larger opportunity – distributed investment.

They’re about to launch a platform that will allow anybody to invest in solar projects at a respectable rate of return. The solar developers will get loans for their projects at rates below what they can get from the bank. Solar Mosaic takes a modest fee, and everyone is happy – except the banks.

The Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act that is making its way through Congress points to similar ideas – crowd-venture funding and community-owned businesses. Although they’d love to see the law pass, Solar Mosaic isn’t putting all their eggs in that basket – their investment instruments will be approved by the SEC under current laws.

What’s beautiful about what happening here is that the company’s commitment to making a difference led them into a space that they didn’t imagine they would enter. They’ll be enabling development of solar infrastructure, as they originally hoped, but they’ll be doing much more – creating a disruptive funding model that cuts out the middle-man and promises to change the way we build.

Community, On the Road, The Developing Future funding, solar