Google Warms to Solar Energy With $75M Investment

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Sept. 27 plunked down $75 million to provide solar panels on residential roofs for up to 3,000 homeowners, marking the company's second investment in solar energy for homes.

Google will seed partner Clean Power Finance with money to contract with third-party installers, such as American Vision Solar, SunLogic and California Solar Systems, to put solar panels into homes.
Solar installers contract with Clean Power Finance to access consumer financing from investors, such as Google. The installer builds the system, which is owned by the investor (Google, for this instance).

Homeowners then make monthly payments for the system, often for less than that of traditional, electric-powered energy. Clean Power Finance will bill consumers and maintain the solar panels.

As a company that employs dozens of data centers and hundreds of thousands of server computers to fuel Web searches and cloud-based applications all over the world, Google is particularly sensitive to its energy consumption and carbon footprint. READ THE FULL ARTICLE: eWEEK