An ad hoc group of buyers acquired most of Sunnova’s assets and business operations, and then placed SunPower-affiliate SunStrong in charge of the significantly debt-burdened company’s legacy portfolio.
Sunnova had a stalking-horse agreement to sell its platform ServiceCo for $7 million cash to Omnidian, a residential and commercial solar lease and asset management firm. However, as a stalking-horse agreement, Omnidian merely had first choice to purchase the platform.
Ultimately, an ad hoc group of debtor-in-possession lenders and affiliates controlled by GoodFinch Management made the winning purchase of $25 million cash.
The new owners placed the acquired Sunnova assets into an entity called “Solaris.”
The winning purchase includes more than the ServiceCo platform, a Sunnova spokesperson told pv magazine USA. Along with Sunnova’s residential solar servicing and O&M platform, Solaris acquired Sunnova’s solar generation and storage portfolio in exchange for $25 million in cash consideration, a credit bid of debtor in possession financing and certain cure costs.
Notably, the new entity Solaris has retained SunStrong as the asset manager for Sunnova’s former portfolio, the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said Solaris is neither affiliated with the Fracht USA subsidiary Solaris nor Complete Solaria, which rebranded as SunPower earlier this year. Complete Solaria took the SunPower name and acquired many of SunPower’s assets following SunPower’s bankruptcy last year.
SunPower’s leases and lease servicing assets, however, were acquired by SunStrong. SunStrong was created as a joint venture between SunPower and affiliates of Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure Capital, Inc. slightly more than a decade ago.
(Read: SunPower rises again)
These acquisitions significantly expanded SunStrong’s platform and pushed it up to one of the largest residential solar asset managers in the country, according to the company. SunStrong said its managed portfolio is now over 500,000 solar customers and 4 GW of distributed generation and storage assets across the United States.
Sunnova CEO Paul Mathews will join SunStrong as chief revenue office, a new role SunStrong created.
Paul Mathews was only recently named CEO and president of Sunnova in March. A couple days after Mathews was named CEO and less than two weeks after Sunnova said its cash flow was not sufficient to meet obligations and fund operations, Sunnova awarded bonuses totaling $2.12 million to Mathews and its three highest ranking executives.
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