French asset manager RGreen Invest, through its INFRAGREEN equity funds, and Renalfa Solarpro are launching a new joint venture company.
Both sponsors are jointly committing €200m in equity to Renalfa Power Clusters (RPC), which will finance the construction of an €800m pipeline of large hybrid renewable energy and storage assets in Romania and Poland.
The new venture builds on the scale and success of the partners’ first joint venture, Renalfa IPP. In less than five years, Renalfa IPP has grown into one of Europe’s leading investors and operators of utility-scale hybrid assets equipped with long-duration battery energy storage systems (BESS). This rapid development has enabled Renalfa IPP to implement an innovative business model and become the first company in Europe to bring green baseload products to market.
RPC will deploy next generation technologies for renewable power generation, storage and dispatch, marking a pioneering step forward in electrification and the energy transition. It will deliver demand side optimisation solutions for low carbon industries and data centres, leveraging long duration BESS as a cornerstone technology.
Nicolas Rochon, founder and chief executive officer of RGreen Invest, said: “Over the past five years, our partnership with the Renalfa team has demonstrated that Europe, and Eastern Europe in particular, can be a fertile ground for innovative business models and advanced financing and risk-management frameworks.
“Renalfa IPP has evolved into one of Europe’s leading platforms deploying long-duration BESS to integrate large-scale renewables and deliver competitive green baseload products to the market. With RPC, we are taking this ambition to the next level”.
Ivo Prokopiev, CEO of Renalfa, said: “We are thankful to our partners from RGreen Invest for supporting unorthodox ways of investing in renewables. Our philosophy has always been that investors in energy transition should not try to shy away from risks and volatility related to renewables, but understand and manage them by applying new business models and the latest technologies.
“Most of the people don’t talk about it, but we are in the midst of the electrification revolution. It is not noisy and is purely market-based. It isn’t dependent on policy instruments, that’s why it is irreversible. There is a learning curve on how to apply batteries and optimising technologies in the different use cases of economic activity. The banks and the capital markets started to see the opportunity and I expect more financing to be available for competitive merchant projects.”
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