Canadian Solar exhibiting this week at the Solar Asset Management and O&M Conference in San Francisco, announced that it has launched a new worldwide business unit focused on delivering solar Operations and Maintenance Services for utility-scale power plants.
“Our O&M business was born out of necessity to operate and maintain our own utility scale solar power plants in Ontario, Canada,” said Dr. Shawn Qu, chairman and chief executive officer of Canadian Solar. “Since all the solar plants were our own, we built the O&M team to provide the best quality of service and operations in order to maximize the value of our own solar assets. Now we are making these best practices and processes, fully ingrained in our O&M team’s DNA, available to third-party asset owners.”
Recently Canadian Solar secured a non-recourse project finance facility of up to JPY16 billion ($149 million) from Shinsei Bank, Limited (“Shinsei Bank“) for its 53.4 MWp Oita Hijimachi solar power project.
The non-recourse facility has an 18.5-year tenor, with debt repayment flexibility in 2019 to enable a potential sale of the solar power project to Canadian Solar Infrastructure Fund, Inc., recently listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
The Oita Hijimachi solar power project is located on Kyushu Island in southern Japan. Construction of the project commenced in November 2017.
Canadian Solar will supply approximately 160,000 CS6U MaxPower solar panels. The project is expected to begin commercial operation in May 2019 and will sell its electricity generation to Kyushu Electric Power Company, Inc. under a 20-year feed-in-tariff contract at the highest rate of JPY40.0 ($0.37) per kWh.
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