SunShare looking to scale up and expand geographically

Ember Infrastructure’s recent USD 30m investment in SunShare will help the community solar developer push into different verticals.

The Denver-based company has plans to raise USD 500m in equity and debt. Next, SunShare is planning to move into distributed generation, microgrid projects and storage, said the company's CEO David Amster-Olszewski in an interview with NPM.

That move, from “SunShare Community Solar to SunShare,” is “being facilitated by the dropping price of batteries and solar and the increased adoption and federal focus on CO2 reduction and renewable energy,” he said.

The growth story, though, will first come geographically as SunShare looks to expand beyond its native Colorado and Minnesota.

The company has 80 projects across the two states, with a roughly two-thirds split favoring Minnesota, and has recently moved into New Mexico. Next in the docket will be the Midwest and Northeast.

New legislation will determine which states SunShare steps into.

“The Midwest, you're seeing really interesting legislation that's being promulgated in Wisconsin, and in Michigan. We also just saw two weeks ago a 1.5 GW expansion in Illinois,” Amster-Olszewski said. “And then in the Northeast … (what) has been talked about for years (is a) a program in Pennsylvania. I think this is going to be the year that we see a program in Pennsylvania, but you're also seeing significant expansions in New Jersey and Maine.”

Nearly 10 years after SunShare first hanged its shingle in 2011, almost half the states have community solar programs and nearly every state has a community solar garden, as some utilities have chosen to install them voluntarily, according to Amster-Olszewski.

“It has just taken off,” he said. “And you've really seen that trend accelerating the last three to four years.”

SunShare is now looking to outpace its past decade of new generation and is welcoming one of its early advisors back in the fold.

Ember agreed to invest USD 30m on 21 September. Its partner Bob Kelly, joined SunShare’s advisory board in 2015 and will now join the company’s board of directors.

“This is equity so we'd be able to leverage this up with debt and we could be building 300 MW here. It's not a plan to build that much per year. But just to kind of think about the scale, in the last decade we've built about 130 MW,” he said. “Our goal in five years is to own and operate 500 MW of distributed generation projects.”