New Project to be Largest Residential Solar Project in U.S. History
SAN MATEO, Calif. — SolarCity has announced an initiative that could double the number of residential solar photovoltaic installations in the United States. The company said the U.S. Department of Energy offered a conditional commitment for a partial guarantee of a $344 million loan to help secure financing for SolarCity’s SolarStrong™ project. As part of the project, SolarCity plans to partner with the country’s leading military housing-privatization developers to install, own, and operate up to 160,000 rooftop solar installations on as many as 124 military housing developments across 33 states. The project is expected to create more than $1 billion in solar projects and 371 megawatts of new solar generation capacity. USRG Renewable Finance, a subsidiary of U.S. Renewables Group, will serve as the lead lender for the project in partnership with Bank of America (BofA) Merrill Lynch.
“We’re extremely grateful to the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, in addition to our partners, U.S. Renewables Group and BofA Merrill Lynch. Without this group, we would not have been able to make the economics of this project work,” said Lyndon Rive, SolarCity’s CEO. “Now the solar industry has a debt model that can make distributed generation affordable on a massive scale.”