The problem with commercial solar is the cost of the financing. Home solar is on par with a car loan, banks know how to do that with personal credit scores. Utility scale solar is the realm of private equity.

Something like a strip mall is a weird in-between that requires enough manual review that the cost to do all of the risk analysis that financing requires kinda outweighs the potential returns. Will that KMart or Costco keep that store open for the duration of the project? What happens when the tenancy changes?

I don't have any relation with Wunder, but from my understanding of them, they built some stuff to streamline all the financing and permitting required of commercial-scale to make those projects pencil out.

This is precisely the genius of SolarCity: they were able to use the low interest rates banks would charge them to install solar power on people's houses at a much lower cost of capital than the same banks would have charged the same homeowners without SolarCity's intermediation.

That sounds like a pretty interesting pitch as a business model.

But if I recall correctly, SolarCity failed and had to be bailed out by, um, Tesla. Why? Was the free money just not enough?

PG&E currently has 2.4% bonds out. Better than what you can get, but not lower than a mmf (usually less than a percent).

As a rule of thumb, rates won't sink lower than ten year tnote rates. Nobody will purchase a bond from a company that has a lower rate than a tnote.

I've heard they also believe if electric cars get going they can offer free recharge with people buying xx dollars of groceries.

https://fortune.com/2018/12/06/california-solar-panels-new-h...

Maybe not as cheap as large-scale solar, but cheaper than natural gas?

But even used solar panels will be in demand.