Green Options » Shovel Ready

Joe Biden to Solar Power USA With P.A.C.E. ‘Recovery through Retrofit’ Berkeley First Municipal Financing

Susan Kraemer — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:12:00 +0000

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.

Environment Versus The Bottom Line - Weird Wall Street Trading Markets

Alan Smith — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:50:43 +0000

Even for a group focused on Investing First and Green Second, this is getting a little silly.

The longer I am here at the Wall Street Green Trading Summit, the less this feels like anything to do with environmentalism. At some point, when does off-setting stop being feasible, and when does carbon reduction become the name of the game?

>> More Wall Street Green Trading Summit: Opening, Carbon Markets, Solar Panels and the Electric Grid

This was driven home to me by a presentation on the investment opportunities presented by species banks. Now, I didn’t even know what a species bank was until today, but apparently you can purchase an offset credit to get around the fact that your company is destroying the natural habitat of an endangered species. And, there is an entire market based around this principle.

Fixing Our Electric Grid and Solar Panels for All (even the underfunded)

Alan Smith — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 03:30:55 +0000

We’re coming at you no-longer-quite-live at New York’s very own Wall Street Green Trading Summit.

The summit is over for today, but I wanted to throw some concluding thoughts out after an afternoon spent discussing good business models for producing alternative energy and for overhauling our current electrical grid.

>> More Wall Street Green Trading Summit: Opening, Carbon Markets, Weird Investments.

Two presentations stuck out to me from the afternoon, Tioga Energy and Acorn (no, not that ACORN) Energy. Without turning this into too much of a publicity-fest for either company, here’s what they were about.

Solar Panels for All

Tioga has gotten pretty good at a business model that I’ve actually heard about in a few different places: effectively, they lease people’s roof space and put solar panels up on homes and businesses. Then, they sell the energy to the people in the home at a fixed rate (below market value for the customer) that goes up slowly over a 20 year period. There are options for the owner of the property to purchase the solar panels if they would like to down the line, but until they do Tioga maintains everything for them. This means that the company soaks the initial start-up costs for people: often that prohibitive thing reinventing a small business or a home-owner from taking a plunge.