SolRiver Capital, a national solar investment fund, announced the acquisition of a portfolio of utility-scale solar PV projects across the state of North Carolina from Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The portfolio is eight projects throughout North Carolina, totaling 53 MW. Each project is expected to initially operate under a power purchase agreement with the local utility. Once completed, the projects will produce over 91 million kilowatt hours of clean electricity annually, which is enough to power more than 7,700 homes each year and the equivalent carbon sequestered by planting over 1 million trees.
Just last year, Duke Energy and third-party solar developers, as well as industry organizations, reached multiple agreements to accelerate and reduce costs of interconnection for utility-scale solar facilities across North and South Carolina. These agreements include the facilitation of additional solar interconnections via a defined process and timeline, along with reforming the interconnection queue process by transitioning to a cluster study model. This updated process is instrumental for SolRiver to bring high-quality solar projects to this region.
"North Carolina continues to be a strong market for SolRiver. What really secured this deal is our know-how on successfully navigating development and construction, informed by the past several years of building these types of systems in the Carolinas."
Riley Sullivan, Vice President of Acquisitions at SolRiver Capital
In addition, this announcement comes on the heels of North Carolina's recently passed HB 951, Energy Solutions for North Carolina, which establishes goals for the state's electricity sector to reduce carbon emissions by 70% by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050. SolRiver's investment includes a series of PURPA solar projects to provide power as part of North Carolina's increasing renewable energy generation mix.
SolRiver's investment in the portfolio, expected to be in excess of $90 million, will contribute to the local and regional clean energy economy through additional tax revenue, along with the temporary and permanent jobs created throughout the construction and operation of the projects.
About SolRiver Capital
SolRiver Capital is a solar investment fund dedicated to financing the development, construction, and acquisition of distributed generation projects. Focusing on solar and storage, SolRiver owns and operates projects across the U.S. from Oregon to New York. Founded in 2016, SolRiver's team combines top-tier developers, financial professionals, and operational experts with over 10 years' experience each. The group has developed and managed over $400MM of solar totaling 180MW of capacity from 300 projects.
About Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners
Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners P/S is a fund management company focused on energy infrastructure including offshore and onshore wind, solar PV, biomass and energy-from-waste, transmission and distribution, reserve capacity and storage, and other energy assets like Power-to-X. CIP manages eight funds and has approximately EUR 16 billion under management. Today, CIP's funds have approximately 100 international institutional investors from the Nordics, Continental Europe, the UK, Israel, Asia, Australia, and North America and multilateral organizations e.g. EIB.