Corporate solar funding fell by 25% year-on-year to US$4.5 billion in the first half of 2020, but the decline could have been much starker, new analysis by Mercom Capital has found.
And there is yet more evidence that oil and gas majors are charging ahead with solar acquisitions, picking up about 6.5GW – equivalent to 45% – of solar assets to change hands in the first half of the year.
Mercom’s analysis puts total corporate funding – including venture capital (VC) funding, public market and debt financing – in the first six months of 2020 at US$4.5 billion, a 25% decline on the US$6 billion recorded in H1 2019. That figure is broadly equivalent with that recorded in H1 2017, indicating the scale of the setback to solar funding caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
