Here’s a not-terribly-novel idea: Get a bunch of people together,
pool your money, and invest it in a project or a business that will make
enough money to pay you back — hopefully with interest. Banks do it,
right? And it seems like a decent way to fund promising green technology
like solar power.
Or you’d think so, anyway.
Banks will fund huge commercial solar projects, but when it comes to
community-level solar installation, they won’t touch it, says Billy
Parish, president of Solar Mosaic,
a Berkeley, Calif.-based company that seeds local solar projects. “When
we were first getting started, we went looking for funding from banks,”
he says. “Wells Fargo told us, ‘Come back to us when you have a book of
$50 to $100 million worth of projects.’”
That just wasn’t gonna happen. And that’s why Solar Mosaic’s seemingly mundane business model is so interesting.
