Lease Option Increases Rooftop Solars Appeal, Study Says - Rooftop solar panels are attracting a new demographic of customers who are choosing to lease rather than buy, and enjoying the low upfront costs and immediate savings.

In paragraph 7, Easan Drury of NREL mentions "...lower retail costs and stronger federal incentives..." as driving the leasing program into lower income demographics.  Let's take a look at this a bit.  The lessors are in business to make money.  If they don't, they go out of business.  I know many businesses do not invest if they do not get their money back in 4 to 5 years.  Yet the article talks about the lessee making an up front $3,000 payment, paying $40 to $50 a month and getting their payout in one to two decades.

It looks to me like the lessor is going to install the system picking up either a 1603 cash grant of 30% based on the retail price of a system he is paying wholesale for or PTCs which go back to the parent company to decrease their tax liability.  If the grant option is selected, the lessor may be turning his 30% cash grant into an effective 50% or more subsidy if one uses wholesale price as the denominator.  At a 38% corporate income tax rate, each dollar in PTC is worth $2.63 of adjusted gross income.  But, Uncle Sam is not decreasing his costs so someone has to make up the money given to the lessor as either a cash grant or a PTC.  Who are you left with--the individual taxpayers and other businesses that are not engaged in those which get this federal largess.

In effect, this program means everyone else in the USA is paying for part of the electricity bill of the lessee while pumping money into the pockets of some already well-to-do lessors so both can benefit from installing technology that is not sufficiently developed to be economically feasible.