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Solar power on apartment rooftops provides a tremendous opportunity to create up to 300 megawatts of clean power within city boundaries in the next 5-10 years, according to a report issued today at the Los Angeles Business Council’s Sustainability Summit, where city officials announced a pilot program that could result in citywide rooftop solar installations by 2012.

It is easier and less expensive to harness great quantities of solar power from multi-family roofs than from single-family homes or smaller commercial rooftops — in this case, enough to power 30,000 homes — according to the report, Making a Market: Multifamily Rooftop Solar and Social Equity in Los Angeles. And based on an extensive property survey, many of the rooftops with the greatest solar power are found in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods of the city.

The “social equity” aspect was an important one, as researchers from UCLA and USC, working in collaboration with the LABC Institute and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, sought to determine whether the benefits of a rooftop solar energy program could be brought to low-income residents of Los Angeles. As it turns out, they can.