Google Wants To Help You Buy Solar Panels For Your House. No Joke.

ThinkProgress: Google Wants To Help You Buy Solar Panels For Your House. Seriously.

If you to want to install solar panels on your roof but haven’t yet because it’s too expensive, Google really wants to help.

The search giant, valued at $370 billion, is once again boosting its investment in SolarCity’s residential solar power model by $300 million, both companies announced Thursday. Combined with a new financing structure from SolarCity, the companies say this will result in a new fund worth $750 million to help install distributed rooftop solar on homes across the country.
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Time: See the World’s Largest Solar Plants From Above

The Desert Sunlight Solar Farm in California’s Mojave Desert is the world’s largest solar plant with eight million panels producing 550 megawatts of power — or enough to supply 160,000 homes.

For the latest issue of TIME, we commissioned Jamey Stillings to photograph the plant. “I’ve had a long-term interest in the intersection of nature and human activity,” he says. “How we connect to nature; how we decide to use and modify nature for what we want to do.”
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Sun Sentinel: Women in Solar Energy: Nonprofit pushes for greater role in industry

Rising concern over the limited role of women in tech industries has spilled into another fast-growing field: solar energy.

The new Florida chapter of nonprofit Women in Solar Energy hosted its first meeting Tuesday night in Fort Lauderdale, joining groups in 14 other cities nationwide to discuss ways to boost participation of women in all aspects of solar, from training to engineering and finance.
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NYTimes: Appraising Solar Energy’s Value: Solar Panels and Home Values

New research sponsored by the Department of Energy shows that buyers are willing to pay more for homes with rooftop solar panels — a finding that may strengthen the case for factoring the value of sustainable features into home appraisals.

The study, conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, examined sales data for almost 23,000 homes in eight states from 2002 to 2013. About 4,000 of the homes had solar photovoltaic systems, all of them owned (as opposed to being financed through a lease with the solar company).
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