San Francisco has been the epicenter of clean-energy leadership. So we took the opportunity to visit a few prominent clean tech firms on our third day. Our first stop was SolarCity, backed by the celebrated Elon Musk. Solar City has installed over a third of all U.S. residential PV with innovative solar financing options. We learned about this success and also its ambitious goals to develop distributed power generation for the future grid. Afterwards we stopped by Intel and Google's Energy Group to hear about the impressive initiatives they've undertaken to source clean energy and invest in it.
We then headed south to SunEdison, a large utility and commercial scale solar energy developer that recently started to play more in the residential solar space. SunEdison has also taken the lead on yieldco issuance, notably with the recent acquisition of First Wind Holdings by its yieldco, TerraForm. Learning about its business strategy and different product offerings was fascinating and complemented by the fact that two recent Johnson alums were there to show us around and answer questions!
We wrapped up our third day with a visit to Bloom Energy, a ground-breaking fuel cell technology company. We learned about the Bloom Energy Server and the value-add that its clean, reliable energy has served over 20 large companies, including Google, Walmart, and Ebay. It was spectacular seeing the stacks of bloom energy servers with our own eyes.