Last week, solar company SunEdison put out a press release informing us that utility Duke Energy had signed a deal with it “to harness the power of the sun”. Greenbang was seriously impressed at the language used. Rather than simply buying a load of solar energy from SunEdison, Duke Energy wants to “harness the power of the sun”.

Has the ring of the super villain about it, doesn’t it? You know, harnessing the power of the sun to build solar weapons, capable of reducing entire continents to smoking rubble with the flick of a switch. Indeed, a quick Google search reveals villains as diverse as Bond nemisis Scaramanga and Doctor Octopus have attempted to “harness the power of the sun”.

(Note: Greenbang isn’t suggesting Duke Energy is in fact a supervillain intent on world domination using solar weapons. It’s more just buying the entire output -12MW – of solar energy from SunEdison’s Davidson County solar farm.)

Nevertheless, all this language is obviously exciting investors. This week saw another press release, disappointingly free of superhero allusions – or details for that matter.

For your SunEdification, Greenbang will reprint it here:

SunEdison, North America’s largest solar energy services provider, today announced that it has closed $131 million of private equity and $30 million of debt financing with new and existing investors over the last six months. Investors include Greylock Partners; HSH Nordbank AG; Applied Ventures, LLC; Black River Commodity Clean Energy Investment Fund, a fund managed by Black River Asset Management; MissionPoint Capital Partners; and Allco Renewable Energy Limited. These financings are designated to support the operational resources of SunEdison.

• Duke roofs sport $100 million of solar panels
• Clean energy revenues to hit $254.5 billion
• EnOcean harvests €4.5m for green sensors
• $40m for absolutely Trilliant smart grids
• Green pesticides land $10m
• ‘Solar as a service’ outfit lands $12m
• Sapphire’s green crude gets $50m cash injection
• SmartSync picks up $20 million for smart grid expansion plans
• Econcern to stump up €12 billion for green power
• Google joins in Brightsource’s $115m VC round