VH Global Sustainable Energy Opportunities (GSEO), a London-listed investment company managed by Victory Hill Capital Partners, has acquired a portfolio of seven solar and two wind assets across Europe. The transaction will be completed in two phases.
Once fully operational, the portfolio will have a total installed capacity of 248.4MW and is expected to generate 489,900 MWh per year, equivalent to powering over 100,000 Spanish homes annually while saving around 150,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.
The first phase of the investment is the acquisition of a portfolio of five assets with a generation capacity of 59.8MW and project rights of four ready-to-build (RTB) solar PV assets in Spain with a generation capacity of 188.6MW.
The total consideration for the first phase is €53m for a portfolio of five assets comprising a 3.7MW operational solar PV plant in Spain, a 6MW operational onshore wind asset in Sweden, a 20MW solar PV plant under construction in Portugal, a 10.3MW solar PV plant under construction in Spain, and a 19.8MW RTB onshore wind asset in Spain.
The second phase of the investment consists of funding the construction of the 188.6MW RTB solar PV assets, for a total amount of €45m in Q4 of this year. The construction is to be fully funded by a European strategic fund and project finance debt.
Once the second phase is completed, GSEO will be the largest owner of the portfolio with an effective ownership of 43.5%, with the balance split between the equity co-investor and joint venture partners, Spanish Power, a developer and owner of renewable projects in Iberia and Sweden.
Richard Lum, co-CIO of Victory Hill Capital Partners, said: “We are pleased to announce this new investment, which will bring the total number of assets in the GSEO portfolio to 36, split across seven countries and six technologies. The transaction commits capital previously earmarked for the second project in our UK flexible power and carbon capture and reuse (CCR) programme, to a programme which will generate yields for shareholders in a more time efficient manner, without compromising on returns.
“Key power-dependent economies in Western Europe, including those in this programme (Spain, Portugal and Sweden) are widely acknowledged to be at the front end of significant electricity demand in the coming years, and our programme will target structural demand gaps caused by the disruptive effect of power demand emanating from areas such as data centres driven by the energy intensiveness of AI processes.”
He added that “it has been estimated that power demand in Europe may increase by close to 50% in the next decade as a result of the build-out of AI-driven data centres” throughout the region.
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