LOS ANGELES Thu Nov 14, 2013 9:06am EST
The Google signage is seen at the company's headquarters in New York January 8, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Andrew KellyLOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Technology giant Google Inc and private equity firm KKR & Co LP are investing $400 million in six solar power plants in California and Arizona.
In a statement, the companies said the plants are being built and sold by Recurrent Energy, a San Francisco developer of utility-scale solar projects that is owned by Japan's Sharp Corp.
The deal is valued at $400 million, according to a Google spokeswoman. That includes equity investments and debt financing from Google and KKR.
The five projects in California and one in Arizona will generate 106 megawatts of electricity, or about enough to power 17,000 homes. They will be in service by January of next year.
(Reporting by Nichola Groom. Editing by Andre Grenon)
SOf course, Spotify cast a positive light on the information: 80-percent of the songs in the catalog have actually been streamed at least once. Presented this way, it's quite a shock that Spotify's 24 million monthly users have meandered their way out to that much music. For example, you'd never think that somebody actually listens to obscurities like Squab Teen, but lo, they've got three followers on Spotify (this blogger included).Music services love (LOVE!) to tout the size of their catalogs. Spotify, like Rdio, Xbox Music, and iTunes Radio all brag about their catalogs that all contain more than 20 million songs. But it's easy to forget that a huge selection of songs that nobody wants to listen to doesn't really mean anything. Consider that Pandora defends its relatively meager 1 million song catalog by saying it's not that quantity of songs that matters but rather the quality of the selection and of the service that helps people discover the music. Spotify's 80-percent metric suggests that, yes, users are making it out to the nether regions of Spotify's catalog and by proxy, that Spotify's doing a decent job of getting them out there. Still, those 4 million unstreamed jams must be lonely. Can you spare a stream for a starving song? [Spotify via Buzzfeed]
