SunEdison in $209m wind deal with JPMorgan

SunEdison has agreed to sell two wind farms in Maine, generating 333 megawatts (MW), in a $209 million equity deal with Terra Nova Renewable Partners, a vehicle formed with JPMorgan Asset Management.

JPMorgan Asset Management will purchase the wind farms, which have an enterprise value of $787 million, and provide SunEdison with upfront development margin. The 148MW project in Oakfield is operational and the 185MW project in Bingham should go online next year, with remaining costs expected to be funded with bank debt and tax equity.

SunEdison, one of the world’s largest renewable developers, will maintain rights to repurchase the project from the partnership for a period of five years. It will also grant yieldco TerraForm Power call rights to the projects should they be repurchased.

SunEdison and JPMorgan created Terra Nova together as part of an equity partnership, where JPMorgan’s institutional investors provide funding to purchase renewable energy projects developed or purchased by SunEdison.

Though SunEdison shed two of its wind assets, it expanded into the emerging energy storage sector earlier this week. Using batteries developed by energy storage leader Imergy, SunEdison agreed to a 10-year agreement with an electricity transmission company in Ontario to build and operate a 5MW battery storage system.

The deal is SunEdison’s first large-scale commercial grid-connected energy storage project and it’s one of the first for Canada and Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO). IESO said that, along with storage, it will use data from the system to better understand energy usage from wind and solar. Construction on the project will start in early 2017 and begin operations later that year.

This article was first published on Low Carbon Energy Investor, Infrastructure Investor’s sister publication focused on global energy transition markets.