It's easy to feel powerless in the face of global challenges like water pollution and climate change. But we are not powerless.

When individuals work together as part of a movement, their collective impact can be dramatic. This is what's happening at SolarCity: one family, one school, one business and one neighborhood at a time, all going solar together. Collectively helping to solve a problem through individual action. Today I'm excited to say I've joined the SolarCity movement, and have the great honor to lead the company's Solar Ambassador program.

Founded with a mission to accelerate the mass adoption of clean power, SolarCity started in a spare bedroom of co-founder Pete Rive's apartment. Eight years later, we're providing more than one in every three new residential solar systems in America , from Newark, New Jersey to Hilo, Hawaii.

We've done that by making clean electricity more affordable than utility power. The results: our customers have offset 1,313,769 tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to offsetting 3,109,849,271 miles driven in a car, and conserving 745,830,021 gallons of water that would have been used to generate electricity from fossil-fuel sources.

The solar movement is also an increasingly undeniable job creator. SolarCity is currently hiring more than 350 people a month, adding to a national solar workforce of more than 142,000. Our company recently broke ground ona solar panel gigafactory , a manufacturing facility in New York that is expected to be the largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. We expect this project to create thousands of additional jobs and add to SolarCity's 8,500-strong workforce.

What does this look like from the ground? It looks likea school district in an impoverished California community reinstating music instruction with the savings it reaped from solar . It looks like thousands of solar-powered homes for our soldiers and their families in every branch of the U.S. military. It looks like businesses, from big-box giants to mom-and-pop storefronts, joining churches, universities, and low-income housing communities in stepping up to use renewable energy. It looks like thousands of families not only going solar but powering their electric cars with the clean energy they generate right at home, driving with zero pollution and bypassing the gas station while they're at it.

When you put all that together, you realize that the future we've been waiting for is here now. We are changing the way we power our country from our own backyards, transforming America's energy infrastructure by moving away from the old, polluting sources to the new clean energy future we want for ourselves and our children-and lowering our individual utility bills all the while.

The best part? You don't even have to own a home or live in one of the15 states we service to get involved. Our Solar Ambassador program gives anyone in the U.S. the resources to spread the word about the power of solar. About 200 new Ambassadors have signed up each business day since the program began, and we now have more than 30,000 in all. I'll be leading the charge on this program, building an infrastructure that will place Ambassadors at the forefront of efforts to bring solar to their communities. What excites me most about this program is that the public can get involved, and I know how powerful those kinds of movements can be.

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