Now this is innovative and interesting thinking:
The goal behind municipal financing is to eliminate perhaps the largest disincentive to installing solar power systems: the enormous initial cost. Although private financing is available through solar companies, homeowners often balk because they worry that they will not stay in the house long enough to have the investment — which runs about $48,000 for an average home and tens of thousands of dollars more for a larger home in a hot climate — pay off.
But cities like Palm Desert lobbied to change state laws so that solar power systems could be financed like gas lines or water lines, covered by a loan from the city and secured by property taxes. The advantage of this system over private borrowing is that any local homeowners are eligible (not just those with good credit), and the obligation to pay the loan attaches to the house and would pass to any future buyers.
The obvious drawback here is that this is going to be good for people in higher value neighborhoods, where the attachment of a solar panel municipal loan won’t make alot of difference to a potential buyer. Or good for people who have paid down a decent part of their mortgages and expect to be in that house for a long time. But it may make a house with such a loan attached tougher to get, imagining that you’d have to qualify for the mortgage plus the balance of a municipal loan. This is not going to be for everybody, but I think that this is an innovative way to get to provide incentives for adoption of this technology.