Silver Spring Networks finally went public this morning, and similar to SolarCity back in December it was priced reasonably and popped upon opening. Reports indicate that the IPO was oversubscribed, a rare event in cleantech IPOs these days. A major reason for this is that valuations have come down to earth across the board and founders have been willing to go public at lower valuations.

In exchange they get liquidity and public money. It also creates an incentive for investors to hang on to their shares and not run for the exits the minute the company goes public, which was one of the issues with the Facebook IPO. In a year we’ll be sitting here and there’s a much greater chance that Silver Spring Networks will be trading at a higher price than the price at which it went public. That’ll be because the offering price was reasonable. It also suggests that with venture capital funding for cleantech on the downslope that companies like Silver Spring Networks aren’t getting funding in private markets that is significantly more attractive than financing from public markets.

SolarCity went public at $8 a share and now trades for double that. At the end of the day, that’s very good for cleantech because it should further loosen capital markets and help spur a bit of VC.