Green Options

Renewable Funding’s PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) solar funding, begun by Cisco DeVries with Berkeley First was a breakthrough in making solar affordable. Now VC high-flyers Draper Fisher Jurvetson, New Cycle Capital, and RWE Ventures have just invested $12.2 million in a first round of financing to make this sober and sensible solar funding available to more homeowners.

Renewable Funding is a business in the Common Good. And it could be big too. There’s potentially a gigaton of greenhouse gas reductions to be made, at no cost to local, state, or federal governments from a $280 billion potential market in PACE solar funding in the US, acording to a UC Berkeley study published in Environment Magazine.

Vice President Joe Biden just revealed a plan to make Berkeley First available nationwide. Yesterday at his Middle Class Task Force meeting Biden proposed the way to make solar roofs easy for everyone to afford with virtually free solar panels. If you now pay your current electricity bill and own a home, that’s literally all it takes to go solar under municipal tax assessment financing.

That’s because his plan; detailed in Recovery Through Retrofit simply makes the very successful Berkeley First municipal tax assessment financing a Federal program, called PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy), funded nationwide through the Recovery Act.