SunPower Inc., a solar technology, services and installation company in Orem, has announced it has signed a letter of intent for an all-equity transaction to acquire Cobalt Power Systems of Mountain View, California.
Specializing in the design, installation and maintenance of residential and commercial photovoltaic and battery storage systems, Cobalt has annual revenues of $35 million and has 96 employees.
“Cobalt is famous here for designing and installing solar systems for Silicon Valley moguls, often 100-panel systems with as many as 20 batteries,” said SunPower CEO T.J. Rodgers. “Cobalt’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, is only 1.8 miles from the Shockley Semiconductor building where, in 1955, the Nobel Prize winner first commercialized the transistor he and his team had invented in December 1947 at Bell Laboratories. Cobalt is also only 4.2 miles from the famous garage at 367 Addison Ave., Palo Alto, where in 1938 Stanford graduates William Hewlett and David Packard launched Silicon Valley.”
“Cobalt has 23 years of operating history, was the first SunPower Elite dealer in the U.S., and received multiple SunPower Excellence Awards for customer service,” said Cobalt CEO John Paul Bergh. “We started by deploying SunPower technology in premium residential properties and are now expanding into bigger jobs at educational institutions such as Santa Clara University, where we now have an ongoing 1.4-megawatt project, and commercial landmarks, such as the Fortinet building in Sunnyvale.”
While Rodgers said SunPower currently expects that Cobalt and SunPower will reach a definitive agreement to purchase Cobalt, the non-binding letter of intent provides that either Cobalt or SunPower are each free to abandon negotiations at any time.