I see one key factor I was missing. Home owners can get home equity loans to pay for the panels, and those are tax deductible. (I've been building a new business of late which has alas put me in the start-up red for a while so that's not as useful for me, temporarily.)

Due to California's tiers, the right approach is to put in just enough capacity to get your use down to the baseline, and buy grid power for that. Thanks to the taxpayer, the solar system can indeed compete with the crazy above-baseline California rates.

If instead a corporation owns the panels, they get the full federal tax credit, and of course all their costs are tax deductible. However, your own payments to them would not be. This is a downside of something like CitizenRe, if not for their incredibly cheap panels.

Annoyingly, that page you link to does not appear to work under firefox on linux.