Greentech Lead America: Borrego Solar Systems, a North American solar PV company, has acquired solar projects totaling more than 8 megawatts (MW) located throughout five areas within California.
The company has completed the development and provided all necessary project financing, engineering, procurement and construction of the solar facilities.
The portfolio includes two utility projects totaling 3 MW under Southern California Edison (SCE)’s California Renewable Energy Small Tariff (CREST) program. The remaining projects are power purchase agreements (PPAs) with various school districts and include bundled-solar and energy-efficiency solutions.
Borrego Solar’s strength lies in its ability to deploy development capital and long-term project financing to later-stage developments.
In August last year Borrego Solar Systems closed a $64.4 million fund to finance solar energy projects for
corporate, education and municipal customers. At that time this financing was the largest such fund in the company’s history and brought its total amount of capital raised to over $225 million.
“Many solar projects stall due to a need for upfront development capital or long-term project financing,” said Mike Hall, CEO of Borrego Solar. “Our solar financing solutions help drive projects forward as we absorb the upfront costs and provide long-term financing to projects that wouldn’t otherwise get done.”
The two utility projects are Borrego Solar’s first projects under SCE’s feed-in tariff (FIT) program, CREST, which was established to provide standardized fixed price energy payments to qualifying renewable energy generators 1.5 MW or smaller.
Executing project acquisitions or joint development agreements is not a new phenomenon for utility projects of 20 MW or greater, but with these projects recently acquired, Borrego Solar is also demonstrating successful execution on smaller utility projects ranging from 1 to 10 MW, the company said.
Qualifying projects can sell the renewable energy they generate at a set price to SCE for up to 20 years. These CREST projects are just the latest examples of Borrego Solar’s momentum in the utility-scale solar market: in January 2012, the company completed two additional SCE projects on warehouses and distributions centers in Santa Fe Springs.
Like the completed Santa Fe Springs projects, the two CREST projects are wholesale distributed generation (WDG) projects—small, wholesale generators that sell energy directly to the utility, instead of delivering energy to the user to credit a specific utility bill.