CleanTechies blogger Nat Kreamer (COO and co-founder of SunRun) had some big news this morning for us. Hopefully the announcement of $105M in loan financing for SunRun customers by U.S. Bancorp is a sign of credit houses freeing up some of the liquidity that the department of treasury has passed along to them.
This is big news because while it indicates some thawing of the credit freeze, it also indicates some serious innovation. This kind of financing is as sexy as any of the new technologies you see coming out of Silicon Valley.
“Financial engineering” is an ugly word these days, but it takes some serious work to get something like these loans on the board: “This is a specialty asset class,” Nat says. “It’s not like getting a home loan, it takes real expertise.”
SunRun also added David Buzby, the chairman of SunEdison, to its board. SunRun’s moving fast, and this is a serious partnership for a large scale PPA given that SunRun has cracked the code on mitigating operation and maintenance (O&M) costs for many small systems. Learning from their success would be extremely valuable for SunEdison given that their systems are many times bigger than the typical residential system SunRun manages.
So, in case you were wondering why Nat was quiet after my question on his blog article last week… it was because he was busy. Great work SunRun – fair wind and following seas!
Full Press Release available here.
