Google Partners With SolarCity On $750 Million Residential Solar Fund (SCTY; GOOG)

The money to be made will be in financing and financialization, not solar manufacturing.
But you knew that.
From GigaOm:

Solar installer and financier SolarCity announced on Thursday that it plans to raise a $750 million fund to invest in installing solar panels on the rooftops of home owners, and $300 million of that fund will come from tech giant Google. While Google has put over $1 billion into clean energy projects over the years, the commitment to the SolarCity fund is Google’s largest to date, and the entire fund will be the largest one ever created for residential solar projects.

The deal shows the momentum behind the booming solar panel industry in the U.S. Solar energy represented over a third of all new electricity in the U.S. in 2014, and that could grow to 40 percent in 2015, which would be a new record. The solar industry is now a major U.S. employer, employing twice as many workers as the coal industry; SolarCity employs more workers in California than the state’s three large utilities combined, said SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive at the ARPA-E Summit earlier this month....MORE

The writer, Katie Fehrenbacher, has been on this beat for quite a while and is pretty sharp but falls into the industry's PR machine when she  repeats the "twice as many as the coal" industry chestnut.

The reason it takes more people is that the solar industry is so darn inefficient. In a comment at Environmental Capital's December 2008 post "Green Jobs: Are They Just a Myth?" I tried to explain the problem as it related to energy:

The key to greencollar jobs is inefficiency. The more labor intensive the energy production the more people you will employ.

Doing a reductio ad absurdum, you would construct a human powered generator.
At a spacing of one meter, a 950 mile diameter wheel would employ five million people.
At 1/10 horsepower per person you would generate 3 million kWh/day.
Of course paying even the minimum wage gets your cost up to the $90.00 kWh range (i.e $80,000/month for the average home’s usage) but you’ve put 5mm folks to work.

This is an extreme example but the concept is pretty well fleshed out in the literature.

Comment by Climateer - December 10, 2008 at 11:49 am

We'll have more as details come out.
See also:
Why Google Gave Up On Their Renewables-For-Less-Than-Coal Program (RE < C )