Fannie and Freddie Squash Solar Panel Program; CA Fights Back

"An article on the county building department’s bulletin board is a source of both pride and pain for Tim McCormick and Karen Riley-Olms.

The headline reads: 'State attorney general sues feds over solar financing' -- the very same Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program that McCormick, the county director of building services, and Riley-Olms, the county’s PACE project manager, have been working on for more than a year.

Pain, because right at the launch of a much-buzzed-about program to fund solar panels and energy efficiency upgrades on middle-class homes across California -- Scientific American named the PACE financing model one of the top 20 ideas that can change the world, and Harvard Business Review put it in the top 10 breakthroughs of 2010 -- mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, with the blessing of their federal regulator, killed it."

Kera Abraham reports for the Monterey County Weekly July 29, 2010.