Solar stocks swooned Monday, casting a pall on an Apollo-backed special purpose acquisition company and enabling clean-energy investors to buy in at the same price as Wall Street titans like venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya.
Apollo Capital Management-sponsored Spartan Acquisition Corp. II fell as much as 0.7% to $10, the price at which investors including Palihapitiya, Coatue Management and funds and accounts managed by BlacRock agreed to invest. That’s 40% below the SPAC’s intraday peak of $16.66 in late January, following an agreement to take solar lender Sunlight Financial LLC public via a reverse merger.
As part of that deal, institutional investors committed to a $250 million private stock purchase at $10 a share. Franklin Templeton and Neuberger Berman also participated in the offering.
Solar stocks were pummeled Monday, continuing their decline in spite of U.S. President Joe Biden’s infrastructure-focused spending plan that includs green economy initiatives.
JinkoSolar Holding Co. appeared to suffer the brunt of the selloff in the wake of a fourth-quarter earnings miss, and was down 7.4% around midday. The Invesco Solar ETF, fell as much as 3.5% to late-March lows. Stocks tracked by the ETF, such as SunPower Corp., First Solar Inc., SolarEdge Technologies Inc. and Sunrun Inc. underperformed the broader market, falling at least 1.1% in New York compared with the S&P 500’s 0.2% decline.
