SOLA and African Rainbow Energy have reached financial close on 200MW solar PV projects in South Africa for Tronox Mineral Sands.The financial close happened less than six months after the power purchase agreements were signed in mid-March 2022. Construction of the projects will now begin.SOLA also entered into a Joint Venture Agreement with WBHO, for the design and construction of the project, where SOLA performs the engineering services and WBHO will perform the construction. The project comprises of 387,000 solar panels mounted on single axis trackers that track the sun’s position as it moves across the sky.The renewable energy facilities will supply electricity, through wheeling arrangements with Eskom, to five Tronox facilities in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.The projects will be the first wheeling projects of this size to be backed by project finance debt in South Africa and will be early examples of large utility-scale wheeling projects. Renewable projects are capital intensive and long term. The projects needed to raise a total of ZAR4 billion (about $235 million) of funding for construction and development. In order for this to happen, SOLA reached agreement with funding partner and shareholder African Rainbow Energy.