Renewables developer Hecate Energy is showing off its ability to get a project built and sold as it prepares to go public via a special purpose acquisition company — and fund its own transition into an independent power producer.
Earlier this week, Hecate sold its Cereza solar and storage project to Savion, a Shell portfolio company specializing in utility-scale renewables development. The project is under development, but will have a capacity of up to two gigawatts, and is located at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site, in Washington. Its sale brings Hecate’s portfolio of sold projects to over 12 gigawatts, and its revenue backlog to $686 million.
As Hecate president and CEO Chris Bullinger noted in the announcement, the deal serves as an explicit proof point of the company’s “ability to develop and monetize large-scale, complex energy campus projects.”
In late January, Hecate announced its intention to go public in a SPAC transaction by combining with blank-check vehicle acquisition EGH Acquisition, in a deal currently valued at $1.2 billion. And it’s in this window — between publicizing the intent to go public and actually doing it — that companies are most likely to sell assets. The reasons can range from securing the “minimum cash” needed to close the deal, to simply gilding the portfolio before it inevitably is subject to intense scrutiny from institutional investors.
But in the case of Hecate, it’s all about showcasing the company’s bankability as the company prepares to court public investors. It validates the company’s pipeline, builds up the revenue backlog, and perhaps most importantly gives it cash to spend as it pursues a transition from developer to independent power producer.
When the company announced its SPAC plans, Bullinger said that “access to the public capital markets will strengthen our ability to accelerate project development and monetization, while providing the flexibility to evolve into an Independent Power Producer and generate long-term, recurring cash flows.”
And in a presentation to investors earlier this month, Hecate executives laid out their plans for a hybrid developer-IPP model, where they develop certain projects (like Cereza) to sell, and keep others so they can earn returns across a plant’s entire life-cycle. That same presentation emphasized the suitability of its projects for powering data centers.
The return of the SPAC
Hecate’s merger with EGH is part of a resurgence in SPAC deals that began in 2025.
SPACs are shell corporations created to raise capital with an IPO first, and then merge with a private company for a negotiated price, thus providing an alternative, faster, and often simpler path to public markets compared to a traditional IPO.
They had a streak of post-COVID popularity in 2021 and 2022, but were largely snubbed in 2023 and 2024, mostly due to the bad performance of the vast majority of the companies that had taken that route. By 2023, climate tech firms that had gone public through a SPAC were down roughly 70% year-over-year, “underperforming the Nasdaq index by more than 2X,” according to Sightline Climate.
Thanks in part to new SEC disclosure rules finalized in 2024, however, SPACs started rebounding last year. In 2025, more than 100 SPAC deals together totaled about $30 billion, more than the total for the previous two years combined.
Many of the companies that choose the SPAC route — such as Energy Vault in the early 2020s, or General Fusion more recently — are in early, pre-revenue stages, which can make going public risky. The deals allow management to market the company based on long-term financial projections rather than just historical earnings, but often a young company can’t stand up to the attention and disclosure requirements that going public demands.
Hecate, however, is a fairly mature company, having been founded in 2012. It is going into the deal with a portfolio of projects it has built and sold, assets, and historical earnings. The company has recorded over $1.2 billion in revenue since its inception, and since 2018 has held a 40% stake in Fullmark Energy, an IPP focused on developing and operating standalone BESS projects. Last summer, it bought back a 40% stake originally sold to Repsol in 2021, following a dispute over a put option, which allowed it to regain full autonomy.
In other words, Hecate likely could have vied for a traditional IPO, had it wanted to.
But the SPAC deal offers both speed to market and an influx of cash that could prop up the company’s IPP transition. And as surging load growth from data centers makes the market particularly compelling for companies that own and operate their own assets, there’s no time to waste, given Hecate’s ambitions.
“If Hecate is able to select projects from its pipeline where it could choose to deploy the long-term equity, Hecate could establish the ability to earn returns from the entire life-cycle of a power plant,” Bullinger told investors, “all the way from development, construction, commissioning, operations and eventually repowering.”
