SolarCity has closed a US$500 million financing aggregation facility with BofA Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank to fund 500 megawatts of distributed generation solar projects.
The facility will be secured by a portfolio of long-term customer systems and contracts for homeowners, businesses and government organisations. The financing will allow SolarCity to fund customer installations at an earlier stage in their development cycle, enabling a faster return of working capital to support the rapid growth in SolarCity’s forecasted installations.
When fully drawn, SolarCity will be able to finance installations for tens of thousands of homes and businesses throughout the United States. The clean energy provided by these systems will offset carbon dioxide emissions over the lifetime of the systems. The revolving loan will permit fully developed systems to be continuously refinanced through ongoing securitizations or other capital markets solutions, further driving down the cost of a new system to residential, commercial and government customers, while providing committed capital for SolarCity to finance the design and installation of new systems.
“We are excited to announce this ground-breaking transaction for us and the industry,” said SolarCity CFO Brad Buss. “By bringing three of the largest lenders together we have created what we believe to be the largest aggregation facility to date that will grow with our MW deployments over time, enabling us to continue to expand distributed generation solar at a rapid pace.”