CEE sells Zwickau Süd biomass CHP plant at a profit

Ham­burg, 07 March 2016 – CEE, the pri­vate equi­ty com­pa­ny in the Ham­burg-based Lampe Equi­ty Man­age­ment Group, will grad­u­al­ly sell its 60% major­i­ty stake in the CHP plant Zwick­au Süd GmbH & Co. KG to the cur­rent minor­i­ty share­hold­ers Zwick­auer Energie Ver­sorgung GmbH (ZEV). The par­ties have agreed not to dis­close the price.

The return earned by CEE on the exit is well in excess of what was orig­i­nal­ly expect­ed. “We are very sat­is­fied with the exit sce­nario in Zwick­au – espe­cial­ly in the con­text of the fierce­ly com­pet­i­tive bio­mass mar­ket,“ under­scores Detlef Schreiber, CEE’s CEO.

The agree­ment put out to ten­der to sup­ply Zwick­au with heat was acquired by CEE in 2011 from the project plan­ner, devel­oped fur­ther and finalised. Thanks to its know-how in struc­tur­ing oth­er bio­mass project trans­ac­tions acquired over many years and close mon­i­tor­ing of all con­tract­ing par­ties, CEE con­struct­ed the CHP plant on sched­ule and on bud­get. The total invest­ment amount­ed to about EUR 25 mil­lion.

“In our view, fur­ther fac­tors that con­tributed to the suc­cess of the project were the long-stand­ing and close col­lab­o­ra­tion with ZEW, which has marked the project from the ten­der up until today,” empha­sis­es Schreiber. Thanks to the exten­sive exper­tise and good con­tacts of CEE’s experts, it was pos­si­ble to struc­ture pro­duc­tion con­di­tions and agree­ments very prof­itably despite falling tar­iffs under the Renew­able Ener­gies Act (EEG).

The bio­mass CHP plant was com­plet­ed in 2012 and sup­plies heat to 10,000 house­holds in Zwick­au and elec­tric­i­ty to 12,000 house­holds. Com­pared to con­ven­tion­al ener­gy pro­duc­tion, the use of envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly bio­mass saves about 51,000 tons of CO₂ a year.

The dis­pos­al of Zwick­au Süd rep­re­sents CEE’s sec­ond major exit in the bio­mass seg­ment. The Ham­burg com­pa­ny suc­cess­ful­ly sold the bio­gas port­fo­lio at the end of 2015.