Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
no driving in traffic to get to the houses to take some measurements and draft a propos-
al for an installation. As mentioned, we even size homes in the Netherlands and design
solutions forDutch customers, half aworldaway fromouroffice inOakland, California.
The time and cost savings from this approach are obvious, and the efficiency has led
tohypergrowthinourbusinessthatallowsustoemployevenmorepeople.Iliketothink
we're also saving lives because we're placing fewer people on roofs than would other-
wise be required—and each time you get on a hazardous job site, you're taking risks.
More technologies like this will be created to save time, money, and lives to proliferate
solar in the Rooftop Revolution.
At least one exciting example for further job creation is the ingenious web-enabled
commerce possible with Solar Mosaic, introduced in
chapter 3
. This is a crowdfunding
platform for solar project developers: you go to a website either to invest in a solar pro-
ject or to set up a “mosaic” that can be capitalized by other people coming to the site to
invest and buy a piece, or “tile,” in your solar project.
This kind of business is booming—ePropser and Lending Club, which are peer-to-
peer lending variations on the theme, each move hundreds of millions of dollars per
year. And like eBay a decade ago and Kiva in the developing world, these crowdfund-
ing platforms will give all kinds of people the opportunity to build their own small busi-
nesses—in this case a solar project that makes money from the electricity it generates.
As Republican Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts said in Congress in late 2011,
crowdfunding“hasthepotentialtobeapowerfulnewventurecapitalmodelfortheFace-
book and Twitter age and its potential to create jobs is enormous.” Crowdfunding is an
online path for small businesses to grow, yet, as the senator noted, “the world right now
is built around big business.”
But small businesses of fewer than 500 people represent 99 percent of all employer
firms in the United States. They employ half of all private-sector employees and created
65 percent of net new jobs in the past 20 years. Of high-tech workers, 43 percent are
in small businesses as scientists, engineers, programmers, and so on. Information tech-
nology meets energy technology—IT and ET—and makes for the business models that
matter in recovering from the Great Recession and spawning our New Greatest Genera-
tion.
Thedisruptionoftheenergyandthefinanceworlds,linkedwithlocal,social,andmo-
bile software and an information layer to existing infrastructure, will be enormous. The
Information Age has transformed nearly every other industry on the planet, but as en-
ergyconsumerswe'restillconstrictedbynineteenth-centuryenergysourcesandbusiness
models. In our electricity-generating infrastructure, we need serious innovation, which
has stagnated, to refocus on this nexus; and our talented technologists should be doing
