Renewable energy developer BrightNight just closed a $440 million strategic investment from banking giant Goldman Sachs.

The equity investment will help Florida-based BrightNight build out its pipeline of utility-scale solar and energy storage projects, which together represent 31 gigawatts of clean power, the company announced on Monday. Among those projects is the 810-megawatt solar installation Starfire, slated for an old mining site in eastern Kentucky.

The giant ​“coal to solar” project is getting underway as Kentucky officials seek to scale the state’s paltry clean energy capacity to attract major industrial manufacturers. Century Aluminum, for instance, has said it’s considering building a green smelter in the Appalachian state — but the final decision depends on whether Century can secure a steady supply of affordable, carbon-free electricity to run the massive new facility.

BrightNight, which was founded in 2019, develops, builds, and operates large renewables projects across the United States and Asia-Pacific region. In 2022, the company closed on a $500 million investment from Global Infrastructure Partners and its co-investors, which will continue to fund the construction equity needs of BrightNight’s projects.

The new investment from Goldman Sachs will help BrightNight further pursue its independent-power-producer business model and advance its portfolio, with the aim of ​“delivering cutting-edge clean power projects to serve our customers across the U.S,” Martin Hermann, BrightNight’s chairman and CEO, said in a press release.

BrightNight also said this week that it will ​“upsize” its corporate credit facility from $375 million to $400 million, which will give the developer the necessary balance sheet support to execute on its U.S. project portfolio, according to the company.

Construction is already underway on one of those projects: the 300 MW solar installation Box Canyon in Pinal County, Arizona, which is scheduled to come online in the second quarter of 2025. Two big solar-plus-battery-storage projects are under development in Washington state, and BrightNight recently secured approval to build another hybrid system in Victoria, Australia.

In Kentucky, BrightNight is developing the $1 billion Starfire installation as well as the 240 MW Gage Solar Project and 125 MW Ragland Solar Project, both in the western part of the state. If all three projects are built as planned, they’ll boost the amount of solar currently installed in Kentucky by more than sixfold.