Altus Power America Adopts the beEdison Platform to Help Source $100 Million in Solar Investments

OLD GREENWICH, Conn. and WASHINGTON, Dec. 17, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Altus Power America announced it has adopted the beEdison software and services platform powered by truSolar®, and will invest $100 million behind non-residential solar project assets screened by beEdison. The initial term of the license will run through mid-2017. 

"beEdison has created an incredibly powerful tool for developers and EPCs to present screened deals to solar asset buyers.  The platform helps Altus facilitate project financing while providing the most efficient and cost-effective way to evaluate and analyze opportunities for us to invest our development and take-out capital," said Justin Marron, Managing Partner at Altus. "The team at beEdison understands development risks and workflow, diligence best practices, and most importantly, how to close transactions."  Marron said beEdison's platform helps Altus focus on what matters most – doing more deals and deploying more capital efficiently and effectively – and encourages developers to approach Altus directly and or use this excellent free, developer-friendly tool.

Altus and GSO Capital Partners, a Blackstone Group company, recently partnered to launch a solar investment fund with the financial capacity to fund over $200 Million of solar generation projects. Altus has already committed $80 Million of capital raised to projects in development and construction.

beEdison is the first automated diligence engine to be powered by truSolar®, the open-source risk screen criteria and methodology (RSCM) developed by the solar industry to drive down financing costs for non-residential solar installations. truSolar® evaluates more than 800 factors impacting a project's performance, establishing a standardized model to assess commercial solar projects and helping unlock the potential trillion-dollar commercial solar market. The truSolar® standard is being transferred to a non-profit accreditation body in early 2015, when it will become available for use by the entire industry.

"We are delighted to celebrate Altus as our first power user among leading solar financiers," said Chase Weir, CEO of Distributed Sun – beEdison's parent company and a member of the truSolar® working group. "We have invested many years, many thousands of hours and millions of dollars developing this tool. Born from our own pain as a developer trying to predict project performance, we have designed what we believe is a better mouse-trap, allowing the typical initial assessment of projects that can take 30 days to be done in 30 minutes."

beEdison uses the truSolar® uniform risk-screening standard to simplify what can be a tremendously complex process, similar to how TurboTax works for the tax code. Linking survey and recommendation engines to readiness ratings, document libraries, financial information, a deal room and powerful reporting tools, the platform intuitively automates the process of screening non-residential solar projects.  Informed by the performance of more than 1,000 non-residential and small-utility solar projects valued at more than $10 billion, beEdison offers the first workflow education and diligence automation platform for developers and investors. 

While Altus will be the first major solar financier using beEdison, the platform has nearly 75 other users of its beta version – including firms among the top five utilities, investment banks, lenders, tax equity providers, hedge funds and independent power producers. beEdison aims to complete 3,000 unique project screenings by the end of 2016 representing 15% of the market of non-residential solar projects, which would make it the single largest commercial project platform in the marketplace. 

ABOUT Altus Power America

A Greenwich, CT-based company that invests in, owns and operates clean energy projects. The partners' financial expertise and backgrounds in construction, engineering and design combined with the firm's institutional sponsorship provide an efficient and scalable platform to provide renewable energy and solar solutions to commercial and public sector clients. Visit www.altuspower.com for more information, or call 203.698.0090, or email [email protected]  

ABOUT beEdison

beEdison introduces the solar industry's first automated, commercial platform that standardizes and professionalizes the diligence process for non-residential solar. beEdison is a sophisticated cloud-based software platform designed to eliminate the inefficiencies in today's marketplace, standardize the diligence process, and uniformly assess risk. beEdison helps solar industry buyers (investors & lenders) and sellers (developers & originators) through an automated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Diligence-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform. beEdison is a portfolio company of Distributed Sun. To submit projects to the beEdison platform email [email protected]

ABOUT truSolar®

The truSolar® Working Group is a consortium of leading solar market participants which exists to establish uniform risk screening standards for commercial and industrial PV projects and, in turn, drive down costs and scale up non-residential solar installations. The truSolar® risk screen provides a comprehensive assessment of risks – including system, counterparties, credit, regulatory and performance, and is offered as an accessible and industry-established standard for adoption by stakeholders at all stages of the project lifecycle and industry value chain. To learn more, visit trusolarscore.com/

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SOURCE beEdison