MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google, which says it has invested at least $850 million in renewable energy, created a fund for Clean Power Finance to help its customers install residential solar systems.
The $75 million investment is expected to finance as many as 3,000 rooftop photovoltaic systems on homes in Colorado and California, according to Rick Needham, Google’s director of green business operations. The deal is the second in residential solar since search-engine-giant Google created a $280 million fund for SolarCity in June.
SolarCity and firms including SunRun finance installations for homeowners through leases or long-term power purchase agreements that allow them to install the systems at little to no upfront cost. The companies pick the installers or do the work themselves.
Clean Power Finance, a San Francisco company, has developed software that connects investors including Google, banks and others with solar installers that may lack resources to provide financing for their customers.
That approach is different because it’s “an open platform that allows multiple installers to have this type of financing,” Needham said in a telephone interview.
It may “significantly accelerate their sales” because “a lot of installers in the past haven’t had the ability to have a no-money-down financing option,” Needham said.
Clean Power Finance has about 1,400 installer customers in 50 states, and last year they used the company’s software to sell 40 percent of the small commercial and residential systems in the U.S., chief executive Robert Kreamer said.
“We have really opened the market for residential solar financing,” Kreamer said.
Typically “fewer than 5 percent of the number of companies that are in the business of selling solar had access to good residential financing products.”
The Google fund is Clean Power Finance’s second; the other investor declined to be named, Kreamer said.
Google’s investment may attract “attention from other institutional investors who have been looking at the residential asset class,” Kreamer said.
The investment is an example of “owning the entire asset,” while companies such as SolarCity and SunRun “own a piece of those assets in conjunction with an investor,” he said.
