Read the full interview here

Would you pay $25,000 to $30,000 to put solar panels on your home? If you're like most cash-strapped Americans, you'd balk at that five-figure expense, no matter how green you aspire to be. OK, what if you could do it for $1,000 or $2,000?

SolarCity, based in sunny Silicon Valley, has just launched a new program that will push the upfront costs of a residential solar system down to a grand or two. Under the company's SolarLease financing program, backed by Morgan Stanley, SolarCity will own the solar panels it installs on customers' roofs, and homeowners will pay a monthly lease fee and get the resulting electricity. In many cases, customers' total monthly electricity expenses will go down, and the power they're getting will be green instead of brown.

Launched in 2006 by two brothers, Lyndon and Peter Rive, SolarCity also takes advantage of economies of scale by getting whole neighborhoods to go solar at once -- hence the company's name. In just a year and a half, SolarCity has grown to become the largest residential solar-panel installer in California (though it does commercial installations too), with 235 employees and $30 million in sales last year. The company has expanded into Arizona and Oregon (states which, like California, have serious subsidies for solar), and is planning to be up and running on the East Coast by the end of the year.

SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive is an intense, earnest 31-year-old who launched two other companies before jumping into the exploding market for renewable energy. I caught up with him at the Aspen Environment Forum, where he represented his company in accepting the first-ever Aspen Institute Energy and Environment Award for Corporate Energy Generation.

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