[PragmaticPulp]

All good motivations, but from an investment standpoint it seems everything about this would be better served by a publicly-traded company that owns and operates solar installations. They could pay dividends from the return on the installations.

The way this is structured isn't great for retail investors. You're not really owning anything the way you would with a traditional investment. You're basically just giving them money and trusting that they'll continue to be in business long enough to pay it back. If they go bust, the panels and installations go to creditors and you get nothing. Great deal for their creditors, bad deal for you.

[throwaway2037]

I like your idea. I wonder if we could create an ABS bond (asset backed securities) where a solar installation is securitised. Think: (David) Bowie bonds. Then we can sell the bonds to retail investors. The main problem is scalability: ABS bonds works for big investment banks because the notional is huge (100M USD+) and buyers are institutional. To me: The value to be added is two fold: (1) pipeline of reliable projects (just like sourcing assets / loans for MBS/ABS), (2) efficient buy/sell/coupon payments.