10,000 homes sounds like a lot but it's tiny compared to the US population, only enough to make a press release make the news really. And very tiny next to the world population now approaching the 7,000,000,000 mark. The simple fact is that no energy that needs subsidies or other fiddling in the west is going to fly with anyone else.
Surely they know enough now about thin-cell solar to invest into more R&D for it. Give the 75 million to 75 professors to have 5 new PhD students each and a bag of money for experiments. Given the history so far[1] I don't think a few percentage points more from 375 PhDs is out of the question. Those few points would have a far more dramatic effect in the long-run than just helping to finance installation of current technology for the equivalent of one small town.
It sounds like they are trying to create a market. They are providing financing, so they will actually make money. The initial money plus the interest can be applied to the next 12,000 homes, for example, then to 15,000 home, then to 25,000 homes... This can be done indefinitely...or at least for a couple of decades.
The market of suppliers will grow to meet the consumer demand, and suppliers will invest some of their profits into R&D and manufacturing. And I believe Moore's Law applies to the manufacturing of solar cells.
The hard part is not to make higher efficiency solar cells (within limits), the hard part seems to be to make them cheap enough so they're commercially viable.
For instance, these 35+ % efficient cells have been available for two years now:
But you wouldn't be putting them on your roof unless you wanted to achieve a specific number of Watts on a small surface.
The figure to monitor is $/Watt, and that's where any gains will come from. Any decrease in the price per Watt is real, immediate gain. Increases in efficiency are only good if they lead to a lower price per Watt.
In a typical installation, the cells aren't the major cost anymore. Because of that, efficiency does decrease $/Watt, even if the $/Watt price of the cells isn't lower.
Surely they know enough now about thin-cell solar to invest into more R&D for it. Give the 75 million to 75 professors to have 5 new PhD students each and a bag of money for experiments. Given the history so far[1] I don't think a few percentage points more from 375 PhDs is out of the question. Those few points would have a far more dramatic effect in the long-run than just helping to finance installation of current technology for the equivalent of one small town.
[1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/PVeff%28r...