PG&E to Finance 1,000 Solar Rooftops in CA, AZ and CO

A unique deal between California utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and a solar financing company, SolarCity, will finance 1,000 home solar power systems over the next year. PG&E has agreed to pay SolarCity $60 million to install solar rooftops – with little or no money down from the homeowners! Installations extend beyond California into Arizona and Colorado as well.

SolarCity has made a name for itself through SolarLease, a first-of-its-kind solar leasing program, under which SolarCity installs and rents out the solar power system. The homeowners buy their electricity from SolarCity at a fixed rate over the long-term (typically 15 years). Lessees with SolarCity usually save about 15 percent of their annual electricity bills, which may not be as substantial as owning the system outright, but it avoids up-front costs and allows a family to save on electricity bills immediately. Homeowners can buy systems from SolarCity as well.

PG&E will finance roughly 1,000 of those solar rooftops through its unregulated subsidiary, Pacific Venture Capital, which has been inactive since PG&E’s bankruptcy that ended in 2004. As Rand Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Development for PG&E, put it to CNET, “It enables us to take an initial step toward gaining valuable experience with a technology and a marketplace that may become increasingly important in the future.”

It sounds like PG&E firmly believes that SolarCity’s pioneering SolarLease concept is going to continue its rapid rise to prominence well into the future – firmly enough to invest $60 million in their cause, anyway. Perhaps PG&E just wants in on the action. Of course, we must also remember that PG&E, as well as other California utilities, are scrambling to meet the state’s renewable portfolio standard that requires utilities to get 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010… and here we are.

Posted on January 28th in Solar Funding, Solar News by Dan.