Solar developer and construction company Eden Sustainable has secured £75 million from Thrive Renewables for a solar accelerator facility fund.
The agreement will see Eden accelerate the rollout of private wire solar power purchase agreements (PPAs) for schools, businesses and other organisations across the UK. National Grid recently allocated £2.3 million to support the Solar for Schools initiative.
The companies said the facility was seeded with 15 schools via PPAs which will save an estimated 8,000 tonnes of carbon emissions and £3 million in total.
Crucially, the deal now means that Eden can develop, construct, fund and operate solar assets in-house. However, corporates may now also fund and own solar projects themselves with Eden doing development and construction.
Matthew Clayton, managing director of Thrive Renewables, said: “We believe that funding partnerships like this can help catalyse the industry, accelerating the delivery of vital new renewable energy capacity at the pace and scale needed for net zero. We’re excited to be partnering with Eden, a business that closely aligns with our ethos and values, helping fund its expansion plans that could see up to 75MW of new rooftop solar installed.
“This also supports our own ambitious growth goals, with the aim to double Thrive’s generation capacity within the next five years. The clean energy system of the future will need to rely on several technologies working together, with private wire projects enabling more renewables to be deployed at a time when access to the grid is at a real bottleneck.”
In other news, Eden recently completed a 2.5MW array for global logistics provider Uniserv, located on its 750,000 square ft Felixstowe Mega Distribution Centre (FMDC) roof. The array is predicted to generate over 2,180,000kWh clean energy per year, 86% of which will be consumed on-site.
It is worth mentioning that Eden and AMP Clean Energy launched plans to develop and finance a number of post-subsidy solar projects in 2019. The pipeline amassed to an installed capacity of around 30MW.
