Photo credit: Make more Aerials
For 14 years, Hecate Energy has been a pure-play solar developer: building and interconnecting projects across the U.S. to then sell them to long-term owners. Today, it has over 40 gigawatts of projects under development.
Lately, however, the company, which is in the process of going public through a $1.2 billion SPAC deal, is considering a major pivot in how it does business: from developer to independent power producer. And as Hecate president and CEO Chris Bullinger told Latitude Media, opening up some of its solar developments to co-location with data centers might be the best way to do that.
“Co-located energy campuses require us to be on-site for an extended period of time,” Bullinger said, noting that the idea would be to co-locate with smaller data centers, and scale up the generation infrastructure as the data centers themselves scale up. “As a developer, we’ll be on site for many years more than we normally would have been, which enhances our ability to move into an IPP business structure, should we choose to do so.”
Hecate has been mulling the IPP transition for a few months now. In a presentation to investors in early February, executives laid out their plans for a hybrid developer-IPP model, where they develop certain projects to sell, and keep others so they can earn returns across a plant’s entire life-cycle.
