The purpose of the joint venture is to develop, finance and manage up to $150m of commercial solar projects.
"Our partnership with Altus is unique in that it takes advantage of best practices from both organizations developed over many years of solar energy experience," said Andrew Zaref, vice president of project finance at RGS Energy and president of RGS Energy Asset Management. "It also represents RGS Energy’s first foray into asset energy ownership and long-term asset management, as well as creates a great platform to fuel growth and access to untapped and new markets."
The joint venture is designed to bring RGS Energy into the arena of energy asset ownership, leveraging both organizations’ expertise in developing, building and owning energy assets. The partners will jointly manage the available pool of capital, so funds can be more quickly and efficiently deployed to propel growth.
Further, it allows RGS Energy to integrate credit qualification and capital sourcing into its core operations. This integrated approach is expected to streamline and improve RGS Energy’s already industry leading customer acquisition, engineering, construction and project monitoring capabilities.
Kam Mofid, RGS Energy’s CEO, said: "This joint venture is an excellent example of how we are broadening the reach and scope of our business activities to accelerate growth, enhance margins, and to better serve our customers. It also provides us the future flexibility to deploy our own capital through the joint venture, at the amount of our choosing, as we extend into the energy asset ownership domain."
The joint venture will offer power purchase agreements and other financial solutions to customers. The parties expect the first fully financed projects to be operational as early as the second quarter of 2014.
RGS Energy’s clean energy services are currently available in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Washington, and Puerto Rico.
