Here is an Entire Rap Video About Rooftop Solar Power

By and large, the hip hop community has remained curiously silent on the topic of rooftop solar installation. This is a shame. Fortunately, that coal-powered silence is about to be broken. I give you Sustainable John, and his new eco-rap video Occupy Rooftops,

Boom. The trail has been blazed, ladies and gentlemen. As we speak, Kanye West is thumbing through his thesaurus looking for words that rhyme with ‘photovoltaic.’

Sustainable John, who is kind of awesome and clearly doesn’t take himself too seriously even if he is very serious about renewable energy, has considerable green street cred: he’s a senior research associate at the China Energy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The video is in part a promotion for Solar Mosaic, a Berkeley-based company that helps regular folks invest in local solar power installations, and then allows them to earn returns from the plant’s revenue when it’s up and running. The process looks like this:

The brainchild of tireless solar advocate Billy Parish, it’s an excellent idea, as is the Occupy Rooftops campaign. Expect to see the company all over the place this summer, when Solar Mosaic it launches in full. Learn more here. The company may prove integral in facilitating the rise of distributed power generation—that is, helping us rely less on a handful of mega-plants like nuclear or coal-fired power plants, and instead on smaller, community-based power like solar arrays.

There are a number of reasons this is a really good idea:

-The grid is aging and fragile, so it’d be nice to have access to local power,
-Distributed power helps democratize energy production; as of now we pay what the utility tells us too
-Small solar and wind projects are obviously much cleaner than big dirty coal or gas plants, and safer than nuclear

I just hope the next eco-rap can work that stuff in. I also hope that Sustainable John kickstarts a clean energy rap meme, because I want to hear Jay-Z rap about offshore wind farms.

Image: Flickr, 0H08

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