Sunrun (RUN) Lands Captona Preferred Equity for 9,400 Home Solar and Battery Systems
Captona, a North American energy investment firm, has made a preferred equity investment in a portfolio of Sunrun home solar and battery projects. The deal covers 9,400 residential systems in more than 20 states, totaling 74 MW of solar and 110 MWh of battery storage. Terms weren’t disclosed.
Spread over the whole portfolio, that’s about 7.9 kW of solar and 11.7 kWh of storage per project. Not every home in the pool necessarily has a battery, so the averages are rough. Still, it’s a battery-heavy portfolio, which fits where Sunrun’s business has gone.
What preferred equity does here
Residential solar companies like Sunrun pay for the systems up front and get paid back over 20 years or more by customers. To fund that gap they stack capital: tax equity or tax credit transfers, senior debt, and sponsor equity.
Captona invests at the individual project level, ahead of Sunrun’s own equity but behind debt. The structure is meant to make two things easier: selling the tax credits and placing senior debt on the same assets. For Sunrun, it’s another source of capital that isn’t its own balance sheet.
Captona has used this structure since 2023 on commercial solar, community solar, microgrids and storage, including recent deals with Nexamp and Scale Microgrids. This is its first move into home solar and storage. A pool of 9,400 small systems is very different from a few large projects, so it’s a real test of whether the structure scales down.
Where Sunrun stands
Sunrun reported its third quarter on November 4. Revenue rose 52% to about $1.1 billion. Customer additions fell 24% from a year earlier, and installed solar capacity fell 15%. Sunrun cut its full-year cash generation guidance to about $200 million, excluding equipment safe-harbor spending.
The battery side keeps growing. A record 75% of new customers took storage in the quarter, up from 70%. Sunrun now counts about 5 GWh of networked home batteries, which it pools into distributed power plants for utilities and grid operators.
With fewer new installs, steady financing on the existing book matters more. Deals like this one recycle capital from systems already in the ground into the next round of installations.