The firm, which is in the throes of being bought by Carillion for £306.5m, said the deal paved the way for similar projects given the Government’s targets for the installation of domestic renewable energy systems.

Eaga is putting £15m into a special purpose vehicle fund, which will own the group’s solar PV assets.

The rest of the pot comes from debt financing to the tune of  £225m from a syndicate of five banks. Barclays and HSBC will provide the balance of equity from their infrastructure funds.

The deal paves the way for work to start on several social landlords’ solar panel projects.

Eaga’s Chief Executive, Drew Johnson said, “I am delighted that we have completed the finance raising of this ground breaking project which has been made possible by the support of all of our financing partners.

“The pathfinder nature of the project has meant that it has taken longer than we expected to get to this stage, during which time we have had to carry significant costs to maintain our installation capability, but we are now uniquely positioned with both the financial resources and the operational capability to capitalise on this significant market opportunity”.

So far Eaga has installed in excess of 1,000 solar PV systems, and it is intended that these will be transferred to the SPV in due course.