In 2005, Fight Club star Edward Norton put solar panels on his Los Angeles home; each participating celebrity triggered another free solar system for a low-income family

Edward Norton is known for playing complicated characters, but by 2005, when the Los Angeles Times ran a feature on his home's solar installation, the actor had also become known for something far simpler: solar panels on his own roof. What began as one actor's home upgrade eventually became something much bigger. The study, ‘Peer Effects in the Diffusion of Solar Photovoltaic Panels,’ published in Marketing Science by researchers Bryan Bollinger and Kenneth Gillingham, found that when one house puts in solar panels, the neighbors are more likely to follow suit. The study itself examined solar adoption patterns across California and did not study Norton's program directly. But years before that research was published, Norton had already built a real-world initiative on a similar premise, one that turned his own rooftop decision into free solar systems for scores of low-income households across Los Angeles.

A family history that influenced his decision

Norton and his brother started looking into solar panels for his Los Angeles home in the early 2000s, he said in an interview with Grist. They found that state and city subsidies made it not only eco-friendly but also financially wise. In addition to all that, there was a very personal motive for this decision. Norton has said his grandfather, James Rouse, founded the Enterprise Foundation, one of the largest nonprofit developers of affordable housing in the country, a connection he has credited with shaping his focus on low-income households, according to the same Grist interview. The family connection helped Norton realize that the homes that could benefit most from solar power were often the ones that could least afford it.


How the Solar Neighbors program worked

In 2003, two years before the Los Angeles Times featured his home, Norton partnered with BP, the global energy company whose solar subsidiary, BP Solar, was among the world's leading photovoltaic panel producers at the time, to launch the Solar Neighbors Program. The idea was simple. Whenever any celebrity purchased a solar system for themselves, BP would give away a similar system for free to a family from a lower economic stratum living in Los Angeles. By the end of the first year, the program had already funded dozens of installations for families who otherwise could not have afforded them.

Hollywood friends joined one by one

Norton didn't stop with his own rooftop. Friends from the entertainment industry were brought into the program, and the list grew over the years. Among the early supporters to sign up were Brad Pitt, Salma Hayek, Danny DeVito, Tom Hanks and Owen Wilson. Each purchase meant one more free system for a family in need, quietly adding up to real environmental impact behind the celebrity headlines.

Why one celebrity's rooftop can move a whole neighborhood

This is where the story connects to real research. The Bollinger and Gillingham study found that installing a solar system in a neighborhood is likely to influence other nearby houses to install the same, and this influence is referred to as peer effects. At the average number of homes in a zip code, they found that one new installation increases the chance of another adoption by 0.78 percentage points. That specific study measured organic, proximity-driven visibility: neighbors noticing panels and following suit on their own. Norton's model worked differently in mechanism, using an explicit financial matching arrangement with BP rather than relying on neighbors simply seeing each other's rooftops, but both share the same underlying logic that one visible adopter can prompt more, just through different means.

The low-income solar gap still exists today

Programs like Solar Neighbors were ahead of their time, but the gap they sought to close has not been closed. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Residential Solar-Adopter Income and Demographic Trends report, the median income of solar adopters is still much higher than the median income for US households overall, despite an increasing share of adopters in low- and moderate-income brackets. The same report found that about 23 percent of households that installed solar in 2022, the most recent year with available data, had incomes low enough to be classified as low income. So solar ownership is expanding beyond the wealthier households, but slowly, reflecting the same gap Norton's program sought to close two decades earlier.

Solar has also become far more affordable

One reason low-income solar access looks different today is simple economics. Based on data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the cost of residential solar installation fell by 64 percent from 2010 to 2020, mostly because of cheaper panels and better installation processes. That means the subsidy-driven economics that convinced Norton to go solar in the early 2000s are now within reach for many more households, without a celebrity matching donation.

A small idea with a lasting footprint

Norton's decision to put panels on his own roof was not only about his electricity bill. Instead, it became an experiment in using visibility and influence to help a costly and unfamiliar technology become popular. Two decades later, solar energy is less expensive and more widely adopted. It has become less costly, more popular, and gradually accessible to low-income households on its own, even without a famous name attached. The idea behind Solar Neighbors, that one visible decision can nudge many others, still holds up today, both in Norton's old Los Angeles neighborhood and in the research that has since studied exactly how that kind of influence spreads.