At 1 p.m. Eastern time, I?ll be holding a live conversation with Billy Parish, who at 31 is a founder of the interesting new company Mosaic, based in Oakland, Calif., through which small investors can earn interest financing the installation of solar panels. Parish is also the co-author of ?Making Good: Finding Meaning, Money, and Community in a Changing World.?
You can post questions for us either beforehand or during the hourlong conversation using the Twitter hashtag #dotmosaic. Click here to follow the flow around that tag.
This is how Mosaic was described by my Times colleague David Bornstein in March:
In January, a company called?Mosaic, made a?splash?in the renewable energy world when it introduced a crowd-funding platform that makes it possible for small, non-accredited investors to earn interest financing clean energy projects. When Mosaic posted its first four investments online ? solar projects offering 4.5 percent returns to investors who could participate with loans as small as $25 ? the company?s co-founder, Billy Parish, thought it would take a month to raise the $313,000 required. Within 24 hours, 435 people had invested and the projects were sold out.?The company had spent just $1,000 on marketing. All told, Mosaic has raised $1.1 million for a dozen solar projects to date. Now it is connecting with other solar developers to identify new projects for financing. More than 10,000 people have already signed on and are standing by to invest. [Read the rest.]
The initial success of the company has come through the big drop in the cost of photovoltaic systems driven in part by China?s aggressive push in that sector and also through various incentives available for solar installations in some states.
Can Mosaic and its investors continue to prosper as China?s manufacturing blitz slows and subsidies shrink?
Time will tell.
But Parish and his partners embody the kind of innovative zeal that will ? even with some failures ? be the source of progress in an era of high-speed change. This is what I?ve been calling ?falling forward.?
Parish is particularly interesting to me because of his life path. I first met him in 2005, when, as a founder of the Energy Action Coalition?(he?d dropped out of Yale to pursue this in 2002 and has yet to finish his degree), he led a group of young campaigners at the climate treaty negotiations in Montreal. That was the year Rolling Stone named him a ?Climate Hero.?
Here he is in 2009, explaining what he would do as president. Now he?s an energy entrepreneur. Like a migratory fish probing upstream, he?s exhibited remarkable agility and pragmatism in trying to reach a laudable goal ? an energy menu for humanity that can work for the long haul.
So please ask him, and me, anything you?d like (anything civil and constructive, of course) and we?ll incorporate you into our chat today.
There are also donation-style models through which individuals can support solar projects. Andreas Karelas, executive director of one such organization, RE-volv, sent me this description of the project earlier this week:
Rather than offering individuals their money back with a return, like Mosaic does, RE-volv allows people to make donations, which we reinvest through a revolving fund to finance more and more solar projects. The fund earns a return, too. So the more projects that get funded, the more the fund earns, which enables it to grow faster and faster, creating a positive feedback loop.
RE-volv is actually installing its first community-based solar project, funded by 275 donors, as we speak on a nonprofit dance center in Berkeley, Calif.
For the record | Back in January, I decided to test drive Mosaic by investing $400 in one of the projects offered at that time ? a 55-kilowatt installation on an affordable-housing complex in Corte Madera, Calif. So far, so good. The interest I earn is locked in and is unaffected by the future performance of Mosaic.
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