The rooftops of Amman are a riot of activity, forming an aerial canvas of concrete, steel, and living matter that sustains a crucial, but often invisible tier of economic and social reproductive labor. Focusing on the urban patchwork of rooftop solar water heaters in central Jordan, this paper shows how the creative adaptation and selective transformation of solar thermal water heaters materially challenges Jordan’s state-led national project of renewable energy transition. Jordan’s renewable transition is often held up by transnational investors as a model for global green growth, as it mobilized over USD $4 billion in private investment in new renewable power development. Yet the story of rooftop solar thermal production illuminates key tensions within this transition, by redirecting key revenues and iterating an alternative set of production values focused on specific community needs and environmental conditions. Solar thermal water heaters are a small-scale, portable form of distributed thermal power assembled from glass, bronze, aluminum, and steel. In Amman, these solar thermal commodities are scattered at varying heights across the city, beveling the skyline in an uncoordinated array of shapes and sizes and drawing together a vast network of actors. By tracing the flows and frictions of rooftop solar thermal systems as they alter Amman’s heterogeneous urban topography, this paper calls particular attention to the ways that solar thermal production sustains life in the wake of dispossession. Drawing from sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork based in Amman, this paper argues that simple technologies like solar thermal demonstrate alternative trajectories of renewable energy transition, offering glimpses into the possibilities for democratic forms of decarbonization while bringing critical attention to questions of embodiment and how gendered and racialized subjects are enrolled in, or excluded from, national state making projects. Methodologically, this paper builds from ethnographic engagement with the material nodes of evolving renewable infrastructures to question how evolving energy infrastructures engender novel possibilities for alternative arrangements of power. Through ethnographic engagement with people in places, this paper analyzes how the formal qualities of the built environment come to shape sociocultural and political ways of being and interacting, and the relations that animate, rework, and sometimes undo flows of energy, resources, capital, and knowledge.