SolarCity announced it has closed a $500 million financing aggregation facility with BofA Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank. The loan facility is expected to be the largest of its kind for distributed generation solar projects, and once deployed will finance more than 500 MW of solar power systems for homeowners, businesses and government organizations.
The facility will be secured by a portfolio of high quality, long-term customer systems and contracts. Through a novel structure, 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.
“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,” said SolarCity CFO Brad Buss.
