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Renewable Energy Giant SunEdison Continues To Expand With Purchase of Vivant Solar

SunEdison Inc. said it will entrench its position as one of the “super majors” of the solar power industry with the $2.2 billion purchase of rooftop panel installer Vivint Solar Inc.

The two agreed to combine for cash, shares and debt that value Vivint at 52 percent more than last week’s closing stock price. SunEdison will finance the deal with credit lines from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and by selling $922 million of assets to TerraForm Power Inc.

SunEdison Chief Executive Office Ahmad Chatila has been on a buying spree this year, snapping up wind, solar and hydroelectric assets around the globe. Vivint, the second biggest U.S. residential and commercial developer, will provide SunEdison and TerraForm with a U.S. growth engine that’s taking advantage of declining costs of solar energy.

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Ensuring Your Solar Array Doesn’t Get Caught in the Wind

Solar power arrays are often exposed to the worst weather that the planet can dish out, including hurricane force winds that can gust up to 200 miles per hour on the U.S. Eastern seaboard and on islands like Hawaii and Guam. Whether the solar panels are mounted on the roof, in a stationary ground array or in moving trackers, calculating wind load is a major factor in the system design.

Wind is one of the most frequent causes of damage to solar arrays, said several industry officials. In Spain, in the middle of the last decade, several large dual-axis solar trackers failed as a result of wind, according to Dan Shugar, the CEO of NEXTracker, based in Fremont, CA. “But horizontal trackers as a category have been very reliable since then, so the solar industry converged on the horizontal track as the best practical way to get energy gain, avoiding all the steel it would take to protect a dual-axis,” he said.

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