Bankrupt clean-energy giant SunEdison Inc is exiting its business in India by selling 1.7 gigawatts of wind and solar farms to Greenko Energies Pvt, according to two executives with direct knowledge of the transaction.
Greenko, backed by the sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi and Singapore, took over SunEdison sites in September that include ones with 440 megawatts of capacity already operating and another 1,200 megawatts of projects still under development, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak to the media. The assets are valued at about $500 million, one of the people said.
The sale ends the foray of SunEdison, once the world’s biggest renewable energy company, into the second-most-populous nation. It sets Greenko up to profit from Indian Prime Narendra Modi’s goal of boosting clean-energy capacity to 175 gigawatts by 2022.
SunEdison, which filed for bankruptcy protection in April, listed $16.1 billion of debt in court filings, making it the biggest U.S. bankruptcy of 2016. The year before, it won the right to build 500 megawatts of solar power in India’s Andhra Pradesh state with a record low bid of 4.63 rupees kilowatt-hour.
Winding Down
That project will now be completed by Greenko by March 31, according to, M. Kamalakar Babu, managing director of New & Renewable Energy Development Corporation of Andhra Pradesh. Development costs could top 25 billion rupees ($366.5 million), according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Elements of the deal between SunEdison and Greenko have been emerging since September after the Economic Times reported a deal between the two companies. In October, Fitch Ratings put the enterprise value of the transaction, thought at the time to involve about 390 megawatts of operational assets, at $392 million.
While the bulk of the projects have been bought by Greenko, some have gone to Terraform Global Inc, which said in September that it wouldn’t hinder the sale of assets in India. SunEdison’s 7-megawatt rooftop assets in the country were bought by Amplus Energy Solutions Pvt. The company’s wind down of its Indian operations will be complete within a few months, according to the executives.
Source:ET
