SINGAPORE (Bloomberg) -- SunPower Corp., the second-biggest U.S. solar-cell maker, said it can borrow as much as $288 million from the Malaysian government to fund a solar-panel project in the southeast Asian country.

The San Jose, California-based company plans to use the funds to build a factory in Malaysia to produce more than 1,000 megawatts a year of the panel components, the company said in a statement. The unit, the company’s third in Malaysia, may start output in 2010, the company said in a statement in May.
Record oil and coal costs until earlier this year helped propel solar power growth 40 percent a year in the past five years, a pace that may continue as panel costs decline. A global recession and a credit crunch have made it difficult for companies to raise capital from non-state lenders. One megawatt is enough to supply about 800 average U.S. homes.
U.S. President-elect Barack Obama is pushing a goal of having mandatory limits on U.S. greenhouse gases, as well as a proposal to create a $150 billion clean-energy fund to boost renewable technologies.
“The loans within the agreement are divided into two tranches, and the weighted average interest rate applicable to the two tranches is competitive with the cost of borrowing under SunPower’s existing line of credit,” the statement said.
The loans can be drawn upon through 2010 and the principal is to be repaid in six quarterly payments starting in June 2015, it said.