In May, Redaptive—a leading provider of Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS) solutions—announced the successful closing of a $650 million credit facility with CDPQ and Nuveen. This significant investment enhances Redaptive’s ability to scale its innovative platform, which delivers quantifiable business value through energy efficiency, on-site renewable generation, and data-driven building performance.
The new credit facility will enable Redaptive to expand its investment in physical asset infrastructure across large enterprise portfolios. This expansion empowers customers to lower operating costs, increase operational resilience, and achieve long-term growth and sustainability objectives—all without upfront capital expenditures or added operational complexity.
To gain deeper insight into Redaptive’s platform and the structure of these transactions, Equipment Finance Advisor spoke with Wayne Tentler, General Manager, Indirect & Head of Redaptive Capital. In the conversation, Tentler shared how Redaptive’s EaaS solutions are helping organizations across industries meet their energy and sustainability goals.
Equipment Finance Advisor: To begin, please tell our readers a bit about Redaptive and the unique role the company plays in the commercial finance industry – explaining how the company’s Energy-as-a-Service (EAAS) platform operates for our readers.
Wayne Tentler: Redaptive is a company that's just shy of 15 years old. We are best known for our Energy-as-a-Service product, which we use to help commercial and industrial companies with large real estate portfolios, become more energy efficient and meet their sustainability goals by lowering their effective use of power and improving their asset infrastructure Redaptive achieves this by offering a complete, turnkey service that covers every step of the process. This includes auditing sites, identifying new assets, handling engineering and procurement, managing installation, and financing the capital costs. We also maintain the systems after installation and measure both energy consumption and cost savings, backing up our services with data.
Our technologies have morphed from what originally was specific to lighting and went into a broader energy efficiency environment including lighting, HVAC, boilers, chillers, furnaces and energy controls – anything that is within the building envelope, as we say. Many customers told us they were also interested in energy generation. In response, we expanded our model to include not only savings-based energy efficiency financing, but also generation-based usage solutions.
In the last few years, we have realized that a lot of our customers are equipment finance fans. Given that they have huge Capex requirements and large bills, cash is always king, so Redaptive launched into the equipment finance platform as well, as a complimentary aspect to our customer base.
Equipment Finance Advisor: Please provide a snapshot of the types of companies you are working with when providing the energy-as-a-service offering.
Tentler: The industrial and healthcare sectors are a key focus for Redaptive, as both have proven to be strong fits for our model. Our target companies are large enterprise-level organizations, often in the Fortune 1000. While many are publicly traded, they can also be privately held, but all are exceptionally large with extensive real estate portfolios and significant owned properties. These companies are typically heavy power consumers, operating substantial amounts of equipment and machinery. In all cases these are companies that are very sensitive to their sustainability and responsibility as it relates to the corporate environment.
Our energy-as-a-service model includes tracking savings using a proprietary meter that Redaptive manufactures and installs as part of the offering. The meter has become popular with our customers, allowing them to track consumption, validate savings, measure efficiency levels, and generate reports on their energy use.
In summary, we provide multiple sets of services similar to a service suite that includes understanding the issue, producing a solution, financing that solution, and then measuring it through technology.
Equipment Finance Advisor: In May, Redaptive secured a $650 million credit facility from CDPQ and Nuveen to expand its energy-as-a-service (EaaS) platform. How will Repetitive use this new credit facility to accelerate its position in the market?
Tentler: Redaptive has been a growth story from the beginning. It is a very popular model that has been adopted not only at the enterprise level, but we have also seen it now in the middle-market space. Some smaller customers are jumping on as well. We very quickly realized that it was a capitalization story and we needed to support the balance sheet to continue our growth story.
The $650 million represents a door that opens to the next phase of growth for the company. It is a debt facility that allows all our energy-as-a-service and power generation-related assets to be co-mingled into this large facility. It has multiple lenders including Nuveen and CDPQ, and an accordion with the ability to be upsized to the extent required. It is really a game changer for Redaptive. In the past, we had a lot of different lenders and smaller facilities. This new facility is exactly what we need to launch into the next phase.
Equipment Finance Advisor: Did you have a credit facility of any stature before this new $650 million facility?
Tentler: Yes. We started with Hitachi and a unique structure. It was not perfect for us, but at the time, it worked well. We then landed a facility with Rabobank for $50 million. But given our growth trajectory, we needed to increase and bring in some new lenders. We identified Deutsche Bank as the next party to work with and established a $250 million facility. As our growth accelerated, we brought in new partners and raised additional equity, which ultimately led to the launch of a new $650 million facility.
A few years ago, we launched an equipment finance offering and identified Atlas, a division of Apollo, as the ideal lender for a $225 million equipment finance facility. This facility is currently active, and we are excited to fully utilize it over the next six to twelve months.
Equipment Finance Advisor: Let’s talk a little bit about decarbonization. Many companies are trying to save money on energy consumption, and an energy-as-a-service platform can reduce some of the issues with securing capital, as you just mentioned. But it also provides for things like decarbonization. Can you tell us how the financings are structured and how the repayment plans work?
Tentler: The energy-as-a-service product is documented on a performance contract, very different than equipment finance paper, which is generally hell or high water. As a performance contract, Redaptive needs to offer an outcome for us to be eligible for that repayment. So that outcome is tied to one of two things. It's either based on energy savings through projects like LED lighting or energy generation projects like solar. We create an event that generates power, allowing customers to experience energy usage firsthand. With our energy-as-a-service product, we first identify a savings opportunity, then procure and install the necessary assets. We establish a baseline before installation, and once the system is operational, we track production and usage data. This allows us to calculate savings, and we are ultimately repaid through a percentage of those savings. Ongoing maintenance is generally our responsibility as well.
Our customers can upgrade their facilities with hundreds of millions of dollars and can pay for it through the savings created. In general, this has been something that customers have been successful in treating as an off-balance sheet structure.
We have had strong support, and a lot of customers have been successful in the off-balance sheet recognition, which has been a bit of a game changer and a competitive advantage for Redaptive. We can offer this Capex financing model for relatively illiquid assets, such as light bulbs, and do it over fairly long tenures – 10, 15 years, including a lot of soft costs as well that can be included such as warranties, installations and shipping.
Equipment Finance Advisor: Did you work with other lenders in any way? Meaning, when you get these opportunities, are you laying off the paper – do you syndicate it all?
Tentler: The Energy-as-a-Service model for energy efficiency is fully funded. We generally don't slice and dice or syndicate transactions. It's not commonly accepted paper.
In the energy generation space where you have large transactions, there is the ability to bring in some players from the lending community, most notably tax equity investors, and sell the tax credits. We have seen larger transactions where we can establish SPEs (Special Purpose Entities) and bring in funding providers and participation, but anytime we mention syndication it will likely be related to equipment finance. That is where we see the most value. Otherwise, if a deal is too complex or not worthwhile, we may simply refer it elsewhere.
Equipment Finance Advisor: Who are your competitors in this space today and do you anticipate seeing other players enter the market utilizing a similar approach to finance energy assets?
Tentler: There are competitors that operate in some of the same areas as Redaptive. However, offering a complete, end-to-end turnkey solution is very rare. We believe there is no single competitor that matches the full range of what we offer. When you add equipment financing, standalone technology, and the flexibility of our model to serve both large and small customers, our offering becomes truly unique. We've even helped non-corporate clients, municipal environments and universities, and non-for-profits. So, it's a powerful model that can flex. That's a lot of what we've all prided ourselves on – our ability to produce solutions for whoever needs one.
Equipment Finance Advisor: What’s next for Redaptive?
Tentler: I see it as two key priorities. First, the customer side – educating the market and ensuring everyone understands the unique value, potential, and impact we can deliver. Second, the capitalization story, which requires ongoing attention because as we grow, we will need to scale our funding accordingly. We are seeking ways to make Redaptive more efficient and lower our cost of capital as we phase into the next era of growth.