PACE Loan Group (PLG), a provider of Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) financing, closed an $8 million loan to finance a 4.8 MW carport-mounted solar project at 1000 Omega, a corporate office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The project would be installed in the parking lot of the property to supply power to the building and sell excess power to the local grid. It is expected to save $378,407 annually on electricity bills.
PACE Loan Group financed the loan, which earned consent from a national life company.
“It’s yet another good example of how developers can use PACE to maximize efficiency under the new Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). PLG is increasingly seeing solar deals, like this one, come up due to the tax incentives offered by the IRA,” PLG CEO, Rafi Golberstein said.
C-PACE is a tool used to finance energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements on commercial properties. Real estate developers utilize C-PACE to obtain low-cost, long-term financing for sustainable building improvements, including solar panels.
C-PACE utilizes borrowed capital which is repaid over a twenty-to-thirty-year period via tax assessments.
Upwards of 2,900 commercial real estate projects have been funded by over $4 billion of C-PACE loans, the company said in a statement.
Sustainable Energy Fund, an organization dedicated to breaking down financial, educational, and regulatory barriers to a sustainable energy future, acted as a third-party administrator to Allegheny County for their C-PACE program.
According to Mercom’s 9M and Q3 2022 Solar Funding and M&A Report, the large-scale project funding in the first nine months (9M) of 2022 came to $22.8 billion in 128 project funding deals, a 97% increase compared to $11.6 billion in 138 projects in 9M 2021.
Primergy Solar, a U.S.-based utility-scale and distributed solar and storage company recently closed a $75 million revolving credit facility from Rabobank to be used in developing a pipeline of solar and storage projects.
