Published

1 year ago

May 9, 2025

Alice Rush

Disseminated on behalf of SolarBank Corporation

SolarBank Corporation (NASDAQ: SUUN; Cboe CA: SUNN; FSE: GY2) is growing its solar footprint in the U.S. It has signed a new deal with a California-based renowned real estate and infrastructure investor, CIM Group. This deal provides project-based funding of up to $100 million and will support solar projects with a combined capacity of 97 megawatts (MW) across the country.

Dr. Richard Lu, President and CEO of SolarBank, said,

“The financing is another major milestone in SolarBank’s plans to grow its status as an independent power producer. Assuming full funding, SolarBank will retain a majority ownership interest in what is expected to be 21 solar energy projects with a total capacity of 97 MW. The Transaction has been structured such that SolarBank does not have to issue any new shares, as the financing is being completed at the project company level.”

SolarBank’s Joint Venture Structure and Financing Details

CIM is a real estate and infrastructure firm focused on community development with ESG goals intact. Since 1994, it has invested over $60 billion to improve neighborhoods across the U.S. The company manages all stages of a project. From research and planning to daily operations and final sale.

Kyle Hatzes, Managing Director, Infrastructure & Impact Investments, CIM Group, further confirmed,

“CIM Group has a long history of developing and investing in essential infrastructure projects that seek to benefit communities and the environment. This transaction with SolarBank to grow its portfolio of solar projects underscores our ongoing commitment to the renewable energy sector and our focus on supporting innovative companies leading the energy transition across North America.”

The funding will be structured through a joint venture called “New HoldCo,” formed by CIM and Abundant Solar Power Inc. (ASP), a fully owned subsidiary of SolarBank.

Under the agreement, CIM will invest in non-convertible preferred equity in the newly created entity. Importantly, SolarBank is not issuing any shares or securities as part of this transaction.

New HoldCo is set to acquire project companies from ASP that collectively own 97 MW of solar capacity. The purchase will occur in two phases:

20% of the purchase price will be paid when a project reaches mechanical completion.
The remaining 80% will be provided upon substantial completion.

Tax Credit Transfers and Financial Returns

Each solar project will earn Investment Tax Credits (ITCs). These credits will be sold to qualified buyers. These sales will follow Section 6418 of the Internal Revenue Code. Tax credit transfer agreements (TCTAs) will formalize these transactions. CIM will keep 100% of the revenue from these tax credit sales.

CIM will earn a 3% annual coupon on its investment. This payment is made twice a year. After this payment, the remaining cash flow from the projects will go to ASP.

SEE MORE: Latest Solar Price Chart

Exit Strategy and Redemption Terms

New HoldCo can redeem CIM’s preferred equity 180 days after the fifth anniversary of the last project’s launch. The redemption value will be the higher of the fair market value or a set multiple of CIM’s initial investment.

Additionally, if New HoldCo decides not to redeem, CIM can request redemption at the lower value of the fair market price or the same investment multiple.

If a project is liquidated, damaged, or faces similar events, proceeds will be split according to the original contributions made by each party.

Challenges and Conditional Requirements

Despite the positive outlook, the deal comes with several risks. SolarBank must secure interconnection approvals, sign solar contracts, and obtain all required permits. The company also needs to secure third-party financing to keep the projects moving. Construction delays or cost overruns could pose further challenges.

Most importantly, if the government changes or removes solar incentives, the projects may no longer remain financially viable.

Moreover, the funding from CIM is subject to the signing of final agreements. If these aren’t finalized or key conditions fail, funds won’t be released. SolarBank also needs to secure capital for important construction milestones. The CIM funding comes only after achieving mechanical and substantial completion.

However, this deal with CIM Group shows great trust in SolarBank’s U.S. projects and growth plans. The $100 million financing will work if it gets regulatory approval. It also depends on construction moving forward and government policies supporting solar energy.

MUST READ:

Community Solar: Current Market Landscape and Growth Projections

As of June 2024, the United States has about 7.87 gigawatts (GW) of community solar capacity. This capacity is spread across 44 states and the District of Columbia.

In the third quarter of 2024, the community solar segment installed 291 megawatts direct current (MWdc). This is a 12% increase compared to the same period in the previous year. This growth underscores the sector’s resilience and expanding appeal.

Solar Bank’s community solar achievements include:

community solar

SolarBank: Opportunities Amid Tariff Hikes

With rising tariffs on solar products from Southeast Asia, U.S.-based companies like SolarBank Corporation could seize new opportunities. SolarBank, which focuses on solar energy, battery storage, and EV charging solutions, does not manufacture solar panels but imports them for its projects. Notably, the company does not source from the Southeast Asian nations affected by the new tariffs, minimizing immediate impact.

These tariffs are expected to drive up the cost of imported panels, potentially increasing demand for domestic solar products. SolarBank, with a strong U.S. presence, may benefit by sourcing panels locally. U.S. solar stocks have already seen a rise since the tariff announcement, strengthening the business case for companies like SolarBank, which can reduce supply chain risks by focusing on domestic production.

Regarding the recent tariffs, Dr. Richard Lu, President and CEO of SolarBank, commented:

“We continue to execute on our development pipeline of community solar projects. I also want to comment on the recent announcement of increased tariffs on south-east Asia solar cells and SolarBank’s plans to manage its supply chain.

SolarBank has not been importing solar panels from any of the four countries that are subject to the tariffs announced by the U.S. Department of Commerce on April 21, 2025. As a result its present operations are not affected by this announcement. In addition, SolarBank has been exploring sourcing solar panels from other jurisdictions such as the Middle East and North America, where (domestic assembled) solar panels are becoming cost competitive with the panels imported from Asia. SolarBank also has significant development opportunities in Canada where solar panels are not subject to the same tariffs. Finally, I am expecting that electricity costs will increase in response to these tariffs which will further mitigate the financial impact on projects.

Overall, SolarBank is well positioned to manage this risk.”

solarbank

SolarBank’s growth strategy in North America positions the company to capitalize on emerging clean energy markets in both the U.S. and Canada. By focusing on regions with high demand for renewable energy infrastructure, SolarBank is strategically aligning its operations to meet the growing need for community solar, energy storage, and sustainable energy solutions. This approach not only strengthens its market presence but also ensures the company is well-positioned to benefit from the ongoing transition toward green energy.

This report contains forward-looking information. Please refer to the SolarBank press release entitled “US$100 Million Transformative, Project Financing Announced by SolarBank and CIM Group to Fund 97 MW of Renewable Energy Assets in the United States” for details of the information, risks and assumptions.

Disclosure: Owners, members, directors, and employees of carboncredits.com have/may have stock or option positions in any of the companies mentioned: None.

Carboncredits.com receives compensation for this publication and has a business relationship with any company whose stock(s) is/are mentioned in this article.

Additional disclosure: This communication serves the sole purpose of adding value to the research process and is for information only. Please do your own due diligence. Every investment in securities mentioned in publications of carboncredits.com involves risks that could lead to a total loss of the invested capital.

Please read our Full RISKS and DISCLOSURE here.

The post SolarBank and CIM Group Announce $100M to Power 97 MW of U.S. Renewable Energy Projects appeared first on Carbon Credits.

Carbon Footprint

Want a simpler way to buy carbon credits? Discover our carbon marketplace

Published

4 days ago

September 2, 2026

Alice Rush

Want a simpler way to buy carbon credits? Discover our carbon marketplace

Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.

Carbon Footprint

Climate-Linked Supply Chain Risk Is Already in Your P&L

Published

2 weeks ago

August 26, 2026

Alice Rush

The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.

Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.

Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.

You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.

Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings

The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.

Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.

Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.

What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.

The three commodity exposures that hit margin first

For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.

Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.

TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes

The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.

For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.

The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.

What procurement and finance can do now

Three actions matter near-term.

Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.

Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.

Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.

Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.

If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.

Carbon Footprint

Where should an SME start with a carbon action plan?

Published

2 weeks ago

August 24, 2026

Alice Rush

Where should an SME start with a carbon action plan?

More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.