TotalEnergies Sells 50% of 1.4GW U.S. Solar to KKR for $950M as Gearing Jumps to 18% Ahead of Investor Day

TotalEnergies (NYSE: TTE) announced it will monetize part of its U.S. solar business for $950 million - a move clearly aimed at smoothing over concerns about rising leverage ahead of Investor Day in New York.

The buyer is private-equity firm KKR (NYSE: KKR), which will acquire 50% of six utility-scale projects plus 41 distributed-generation assets. TotalEnergies keeps the other half of the 1.4‑gigawatt package, which the company values at about $1.25 billion in enterprise terms. Short version: Total is monetizing minority stakes rather than exiting renewables entirely.

That dovetails with the company's playbook this year - build or buy clean‑energy projects, then sell portions to free up cash to plough into gas and upstream assets as global gas demand rises. Management frames these transactions as recycling capital, but investors are watching the math closely.

Chief executive Patrick Pouyanne has said the solar sale is one of several disposals intended to raise roughly $3.5 billion by year‑end. That target is meant to offset more than $3 billion of acquisitions that helped push the company's net debt significantly higher in the first half of 2025.

The company also disclosed another big domestic move: a 49% stake purchase in Continental Resources' upstream gas fields in Oklahoma. Continental Resources (NYSE: CLR) is now part of the announced deal flow, signaling Total's tilt toward U.S. gas exposure.

Recent deal activity has been a mixed bag. Total sold an oilfield stake to Shell (NYSE: SHEL) for $510 million last week, but a couple of other planned divestments imploded - an $860 million Nigerian sale failed after the buyer couldn't raise financing, and the West of Shetland gas asset sale collapsed when a prospective buyer went bust.

All that turbulence shows up in the balance sheet. Total's gearing - net debt to equity - surged to about 18% from roughly 8% earlier in the year. Crunch in leases and hybrid instruments pushes that figure toward about 28% on a broader measure. Quarterly earnings also hit a four‑year low in the summer, and the board trimmed the Q4 buyback by 25% as a precaution against further oil‑price weakness.

Brent crude sits below $70 a barrel, down roughly 40% since 2022 when the company launched its $8 billion annual buyback programme - an unwelcome backdrop for anyone trying to defend leverage ratios with cyclical commodity earnings.

From a trader's perspective, the $950 million solar carve‑out is tidy headlines fodder ahead of Investor Day: it shows management moving to reassure the market with concrete cash inflows. Whether that, plus other planned disposals, is enough to reset confidence remains the key open question heading into the New York event.