CEE and Energiequelle acquire two further wind farms in France with a total capacity of 32 megawatts

Ham­burg, 25 August 2014 – The Ham­burg pri­vate equi­ty com­pa­ny CEE is increas­ing its invest­ments in oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries and is acquir­ing two new wind farms in France. In Brit­tany, the 20 megawatt (MW) La Fer­rière wind farm con­sist­ing of eight Nordex‑N 100 wind tur­bines with a hub height of about 100 m will be con­struct­ed. It will be able to gen­er­ate about 56 mil­lion kilo­watt hours (kWh) of elec­tric­i­ty a year. The sec­ond wind farm is near St. Mandé in the Poitou-Char­entes region. The total capac­i­ty of St. Mandé is 12 MW, which will be gen­er­at­ed by six Ener­con E‑70 wind tur­bines. The hub height is about 70 metres. The park will prob­a­bly pro­duce 21 mil­lion kWh of elec­tric­i­ty a year. Both wind farms are in the first build­ing stage and are due to be con­nect­ed to the grid in the third and fourth quar­ter of 2014. Energiequelle GmbH, which CEE teamed up with to imple­ment the first wind farm two years ago, is plan­ning the farm and man­ag­ing the project. Georg Weber, head of inter­na­tion­al busi­ness at Energiequelle says: “With more than 100 MW of installed capac­i­ty we have become an estab­lished play­er in the French wind ener­gy mar­ket. The foun­da­tions for a long-term and suc­cess­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion were already laid with CEE’s 12 MW wind farm in Delouze-Rosières in Lor­raine. We want to con­tin­ue this for quite a while yet.”

Togeth­er with the two new farms, CEE’s French wind pow­er port­fo­lio has grown by 32 MW to 44 MW. The Ham­burg company’s over­all ener­gy pro­duc­tion port­fo­lio, includ­ing the farms under con­struc­tion, has a capac­i­ty of 170 MW. The com­pa­ny is steadi­ly imple­ment­ing the pol­i­cy of giv­ing greater weight to for­eign invest­ments announced at the start of the year.

The French wind ener­gy mar­ket offers CEE attrac­tive invest­ment con­di­tions for onshore instal­la­tions. The rea­sons are favourable weath­er con­di­tions, the geo­graph­i­cal prox­im­i­ty, legal cer­tain­ty and sup­port struc­tures. “From an investor stand­point, France com­bines a large num­ber of ben­e­fits,” states Detlef Schreiber, CEE’s CEO. “We are prof­it­ing from hav­ing entered the mar­ket at an ear­ly stage and can now ben­e­fit from work­ing with an estab­lished part­ner with sol­id expe­ri­ence in deal­ing with the spe­cial fea­tures of the French legal and tax sys­tem, which favour fur­ther invest­ments in wind pow­er and solar PV projects in France.”

France cur­rent­ly cov­ers three quar­ters of its elec­tric­i­ty require­ments from nuclear ener­gy. Wind accounts for less than three per­cent. Accord­ing to the Euro­pean Wind Ener­gy Asso­ci­a­tion (EWEA), installed capac­i­ty at the end of 2013 amount­ed to about 8,250 MW, which rep­re­sents around one quar­ter of the total installed capac­i­ty in Ger­many. How­ev­er, the French gov­ern­ment plans to expand wind pow­er capac­i­ty to 25,000 MW by 2020. 19,000 MW of that amount is to be installed on land.