A way to get more solar power into communities

This Company Is Like a Kickstarter for Solar Power I absolutely love this concept and will be investing with them. Basically, it provides low interest loans and grants to small businesses and nonprofit organizations to solarize their facilities. People can invest small amounts of money which are used for the loans and grants, as low as $25. I will be investigating this company more and if it looks solid, I will give it a try for a small amount of money and see how it does.

This reminds me of what the German government did...providing subsidies so people could install solar panels, and resell the excess power back to the national grid at a premium. They have dropped the premium, but it was a quick way to add a good percentage of renewable energy into the national grid.

I've been investigating the company, Mosaic as I said I would. So far it looks pretty good.

It does have two areas of concern I still need resolved, but I am emailing them about them. The first one is a lack of projects at the moment to invest in; so I am asking what they are doing to bring new ones in.

The second is they do charge a 1% annual maintenance fee that they don't apply to money in their account if there is nothing to invest in. But....it is not clear if it applies if that money is from a current investment return and there is nothing to reinvest in. I can always remove that to avoid the fee, but it would have to be done monthly. The fee doesn't seem steep, but the loan is amortized so that means the returns go down as people pay off the loan. Eventually interest earned will be well less than that as principal is paid off and returned. (Edit) I reread the fee and basically it reduces returns by 1% a year below stated. It is applied to all principal that has been loaned out, or is waiting to be loaned out when there is any project to invest in. It doesn't if there are no projects to reinvest in however.

My last concern is with this setup, it encourages investors to invest in the first project to come along to avoid the fee. Since full risk is assumed, I would want time to make sure the business taking out the loan is financially secure.

More info on Mosaic: http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2013/04/10/update-on-mosaic-and-solar-crowd-funding/ This is a Forbes article I found on them.

https://joinmosaic.com/ The company's site....rooting around I found the page with the information on it.