Coal-to-solar developer BrightNight lands $440M investment

Renewable energy developer BrightNight just closed a $440 million strategic investment from banking giant Goldman Sachs.

The equity investment will help Florida-based BrightNight build out its pipeline of utility-scale solar and energy storage projects, which together represent 31 gigawatts of clean power, the company announced on Monday. Among those projects is the 810-megawatt solar installation Starfire, slated for an old mining site in eastern Kentucky.

The giant ​“coal to solar” project is getting underway as Kentucky officials seek to scale the state’s paltry clean energy capacity to attract major industrial manufacturers. Century Aluminum, for instance, has said it’s considering building a green smelter in the Appalachian state — but the final decision depends on whether Century can secure a steady supply of affordable, carbon-free electricity to run the massive new facility.

BrightNight, which was founded in 2019, develops, builds, and operates large renewables projects across the United States and Asia-Pacific region. In 2022, the company closed on a $500 million investment from Global Infrastructure Partners and its co-investors, which will continue to fund the construction equity needs of BrightNight’s projects.

The new investment from Goldman Sachs will help BrightNight further pursue its independent-power-producer business model and advance its portfolio, with the aim of ​“delivering cutting-edge clean power projects to serve our customers across the U.S,” Martin Hermann, BrightNight’s chairman and CEO, said in a press release.

BrightNight also said this week that it will ​“upsize” its corporate credit facility from $375 million to $400 million, which will give the developer the necessary balance sheet support to execute on its U.S. project portfolio, according to the company.

Construction is already underway on one of those projects: the 300 MW solar installation Box Canyon in Pinal County, Arizona, which is scheduled to come online in the second quarter of 2025. Two big solar-plus-battery-storage projects are under development in Washington state, and BrightNight recently secured approval to build another hybrid system in Victoria, Australia.

In Kentucky, BrightNight is developing the $1 billion Starfire installation as well as the 240 MW Gage Solar Project and 125 MW Ragland Solar Project, both in the western part of the state. If all three projects are built as planned, they’ll boost the amount of solar currently installed in Kentucky by more than sixfold.

Today, coal-rich Kentucky has just over 193 MW of installed solar capacity, which provides less than 0.5 percent of the state’s monthly electricity generation, according to the latest data from the Solar Energy Industries Association.

The giant Starfire project is part of a larger effort in Kentucky and across Appalachia to transform former industrial sites into hubs of clean energy production. Spanning more than 7,000 acres, the Starfire Mine was once one of the region’s largest surface mining operations, but now it mostly sits empty.

“BrightNight aims to be an industry leader in this new asset class of solar on brownfield sites on current and previous mines in energy communities,” Ron Kiecana, the company’s chief development officer, told Canary Media’s Julian Spector in August 2023 when the project was first announced.

“BrightNight sees value in the mission of keeping the lights on from the same lands that have done so for centuries and built America,” Kiecana added.

The developer expects to start construction of Starfire’s first phase of 210 MW next year and to finish in 2027, while the full 810 MW should be completed by 2030, BrightNight confirmed by email this week.

Generally speaking, building on old mining sites can be logistically trickier than putting solar panels on flat farmland. Hauling equipment to former mines requires driving big vehicles up narrow mountain roads to reach unpaved plateaus of remediated terrain. Still, brownfield projects like these are less likely to face community pushback than those going up on otherwise undeveloped lands.

Rivian, the electric-truck maker, has already signed on as Starfire’s anchor customer, through a 100 MW power purchase agreement with BrightNight. The startup plans to use the power to help supply the network of EV fast-chargers that it’s building nationwide.

Kentucky will need to build many more renewable projects like Starfire if it’s going to meet the rising demand from industrial players like Century Aluminum. The planned green smelter could need at least a gigawatt’s worth of power to operate annually at full tilt — equal to the yearly power demand of roughly 750,000 U.S. homes. By way of comparison, Louisville, Kentucky’s largest city, is home to some 625,000 people.