About a month after Tesla announced that it hopes to buy solar company SolarCity for $2.86 billion, the solar installer disclosed that over the past few weeks it’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars in tax equity and debt financing.
On Monday, SolarCity announced that it’s raised $345 million in tax equity and increased its debt aggregation facility by $110 million. The new financing will be used to build new solar panel projects and will bring SolarCity’s total project financing raised in 2016 to $1.5 billion.
The underlying message to Wall Street appears to be that the company is in good financial standing and has the funds and financial support to keep growing, despite any uncertainty with the Tesla deal as well as slower projected growth this year. The company says it worked with 30 different banks and corporate partners on the project financing.
SolarCity’s (SCTY) stock jumped 2% in morning trading on the news to $25.55 per share.
However, that tiny stock bump follows a slump over the past year, from a high of $61.72 in August of last year. In late 2015, the company said it planned to put the brakes on its growth in an attempt to be cash flow positive by the end of 2016.
Regulatory uncertainty, and the bankruptcy of high profile clean energy giant SunEdison, have contributed to the volatility of solar stocks this year.
Tesla’s planned acquisition of SolarCity was seen as a potential bailout by some analysts. At the time that the Tesla (TSLA) deal was announced, SolarCity had $3.25 billion in debt and $1.23 billion in debt payments due by the end of 2017.
The company is also building and investing in a large solar panel factory in upstate New York with plans to make its own solar panels, which could be an expensive and risky move.
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Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk owns 22% of SolarCity and is chairman of the company. His cousin Lyndon Rive is SolarCity’s CEO.
Musk is also CEO of Tesla, and owns 21% of the electric car maker. There’s only one person on SolarCity’s eight-person board that doesn’t have ties to Tesla. Musk recused himself from voting on the deal, which is supposed to be voted on within a couple months of the announcement in mid-June.
For more on why Wall Street isn’t a fan of the SolarCity deal, watch:
Musk has said that he thinks a combined SolarCity and Tesla could make a trillion dollar company, which would make and sell solar panels to generate energy, batteries to store energy and cars, and battery projects to use the energy.
Many financial analysts have been confused by the merger and Tesla’s stock dropped considerably following the merger announcement in June. However, over the past few weeks Tesla’s stock has quietly regained that initial loss, and on Monday, it is trading higher than it was before it announced the planned deal.
