Leading U.S. solar leasing company SolarCity has partnered with Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofA) on a $400 million finance program designed to boost the American residential solar sector.
This announcement follows on the heels of a previous $200 million commercial collaboration between the two companies, and is BofAs second major investment foray into solar leasing following January's $220 million collaboration with SunPower.
This latest finance program will channel funds towards a program designed to make it easier for U.S. homeowners to install solar panels on their homes with no upfront costs, and will serve to cement SolarCitys dominance of this increasingly important solar market.
Currently, SolarCity is responsible for installing one-third of all new residential solar systems in the U.S., operating more than 55 service centers across 15 states.
For BofA, this collaboration is part of the banks 10-year, $50 billion environmental business objective to advance the world of low-carbon solutions. BofAs modus operandi is to debt finance and equipment finance clean energy technologies across the globe, and has poured more than $31.7 billion into this objective since 2007.
SolarCitys announcement follows just 24-hours after fellow U.S. solar household name First Solar revealed it is to take a strategic step into the American residential solar market via the community route.
First Solars stake in Clean Energy Collective (CEC) will enable it to fund and develop community-backed solar farms targeted at rental tenants and U.S. customers unable to invest in their own rooftop solar array.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.