Google inks $280 million deal with SolarCity to finance residential PV installations

Google is investing $280 million to create a fund that will help SolarCity, San Mateo, Calif., finance more solar installations across the country. According to a posting on the company's Green Blog by Rick Needham, Google's director of green ...
June 14, 2011
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Google is investing $280 million to create a fund that will help SolarCity, San Mateo, Calif., finance more solar installations across the country. According to a posting on the company's Green Blog by Rick Needham, Google's director of green business operations, it's the largest clean energy project investment to date and brings Google's total invested in the clean energy sector to more than $680 million.

Said Needham, "In SolarCity's innovative financing model, the company covers installation and maintenance of the system over the life of the lease. You can prepay, or pay nothing upfront after which you make monthly solar lease payments... We've also launched a partnership to offer SolarCity services to Googlers at a discount."

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Jim Lucy Blog

Chief Editor

Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.