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energyRe Closes $815 Million Financing for Five South Carolina Solar Projects

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energyRe said this week it has closed an $815 million financing package for five utility-scale solar projects in South Carolina totaling roughly 360 megawatts, a deal the Houston-based developer and investor called one of the largest solar-only project financings in the state’s history. The five projects — Shorthorn Solar, Culpepper Solar, Clarendon Solar, Rollins Solar and Ross Solar — are each under contract to sell their output through 25-year power purchase agreements with one of South Carolina’s largest investor-owned utilities, though the company did not name the offtaker. Dominion Energy South Carolina and Duke Energy are the state’s two largest investor-owned utilities and the most likely counterparties for a portfolio of this size, though energyRe’s announcement left the point unconfirmed.

Who put up the money

Bank of America served as documentation agent for the financing, with Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) and Santander also providing capital; Santander acted as energyRe’s financial advisor on the deal. The company said the package also drew on unnamed lending and tax equity partners, a structure typical of utility-scale solar financings, where tax equity investors take a share of the federal investment tax credit in exchange for providing a portion of upfront project capital alongside conventional project debt.

Part of a larger South Carolina bet

The $815 million package is energyRe’s largest financing to date and advances a stated goal of investing $2 billion in South Carolina by 2030. Including this transaction, the company says it has now raised more than $1.9 billion across financing packages for its South Carolina solar portfolio, after reaching an earlier financial close of about $370 million for a separate South Carolina solar PV portfolio in November 2025. energyRe says it has broken ground on roughly 450 megawatts of capacity over the past year and now has nearly 700 megawatts either operating or in late-stage development in the state.

One piece of a four-state portfolio

South Carolina is energyRe’s largest single market, but not its only one. The company’s broader portfolio spans more than 1.8 gigawatts across 20 projects in South Carolina, North Carolina, Nebraska and Oklahoma, a multi-state footprint that lets it spread construction and interconnection risk rather than concentrating capital in one utility’s queue. That approach mirrors financing patterns seen elsewhere in U.S. utility-scale solar, where developers increasingly package multiple geographically separate projects into a single financing round to achieve better terms from lenders than any individual project could secure on its own.

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Why utilities keep signing long-dated solar contracts

The 25-year length of the power purchase agreements behind this financing is typical of recent utility-scale solar deals in the U.S. Southeast, where investor-owned utilities use long-dated, fixed-price solar contracts to hedge against fuel-cost volatility in their broader generation mix and to meet state-level capacity needs without committing their own balance sheets to construction risk. For a developer like energyRe, a signed long-term PPA is what allows lenders to underwrite debt against a predictable revenue stream for decades rather than against wholesale power prices that can swing with gas and demand cycles — the same dynamic that let a 5.2-gigawatt Masdar-EWEC solar and storage project in Abu Dhabi reach financial close against a long-term offtake structure, albeit at a very different scale.

What to watch next

energyRe has not disclosed expected commercial operation dates for the five newly financed projects, and its announcement did not break out how much of the $815 million is allocated to each site. With roughly 700 MW now operating or in late-stage development in South Carolina against a 2030 target of $2 billion invested, the company’s next test will be whether it can keep signing utility offtake agreements at a pace that matches its construction pipeline, rather than financing capacity faster than it can put it in service.