SolarCity & Vivint Solar Announce Separate Solar Funding Projects

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SolarCity and Vivint Solar have announced two separate solar funding projects which will boost US rooftop solar installations.

SolarCity

With a third of all US residential rooftop installations in the US in 2015, SolarCity has been leading the way for some time. The company has repeatedly and successfully launched new funding to finance solar projects — only a month ago SolarCity created a $249 million solar project fund. This also marked 50 project funds with 21 different financing partners, according to a VP for the company, Radford Small.

This has been followed up with news this week that SolarCity has created yet another fund to finance over $131 million in solar projects.

The company announced the news on its website this week, revealing that it had closed a new tax equity fund to finance over $131 million in residential, commercial, and military solar projects — though it refused to disclose the financing partner. The fund will cover the capital cost of solar equipment and installation, allowing homeowners and other customers to pay less upfront and then pay less then they would for electricity from a local utility.

“This is the second tax equity fund we’ve closed during the first quarter as we continue our cash generation post-ITC extension and plan to continue our momentum,” said Radford Small, SolarCity’s Executive Vice President, Capital Markets.

Vivint Solar

Across the way, Vivint Solar, which in the same report that labelled SolarCity the leading US residential solar company in 2015 came in second, has secured $200 million in funding for US residential solar projects.

“This financing demonstrates Vivint Solar’s continued ability to access capital markets for flexible capital,” said Thomas Plagemann, Executive Vice President, Head of Capital Markets of Vivint Solar. “Now that we are free from the constraints of the terminated SunEdison merger agreement, we have demonstrated our ability to rapidly access the capital markets for flexible, term-debt financing to support our continued growth.”

This follows in the wake of some turbulent times for Vivint Solar. At the beginning of the month, Vivint Solar announced that it was terminating its acquisition agreement with SunEdison due to “SunEdison’s failure to meet its obligations under the merger agreement.” Vivint Solar then went on to announce that it had commenced “action in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware suing SunEdison, Inc. over its willful breach of the merger agreement between Vivint Solar and SunEdison.”

A few days later the company announced its fourth quarter and full-year 2015 financials, and despite steady growth in shipments and revenue, the company’s shares still continued to tumble.

Sadly, for Vivint Solar, despite an early jump to its shares on news of the announcement, the news seems to have done little to assuage investors’ fears.