CEE acquires a 24.2 megawatt solar farm in the UK from BayWa r.e.

Ham­burg / Munich, 21 Decem­ber 2015 – The Ham­burg pri­vate equi­ty com­pa­ny CEE is expand­ing fur­ther inter­na­tion­al­ly and is acquir­ing the Aston Clin­ton UK solar farm from Bay­Wa r.e. renew­able ener­gy GmbH. Par­tic­u­lar­ly high-qual­i­ty com­po­nents were used in mod­ules from Astroner­gy and invert­ers from ABB / Pow­er One in the Aston Clin­ton park. With a capac­i­ty of 24.2 megawatts (MW), the farm pro­duces about 24,000 MWh of elec­tric­i­ty from sun­light. It is fed into the local grid and used by McDonald’s Restau­rant Ltd to sup­ply its restau­rants with clean pow­er.

Aston Clin­ton is CEE’s fifth solar pow­er invest­ment in Europe out­side Ger­many and the sec­ond in the UK. In 2014, CEE acquired Bices­ter solar park from Bay­Wa r.e. Aston Clin­ton is near Ayles­bury, about 65 km to the north west of Lon­don. Bay­Wa r.e. was respon­si­ble for devel­op­ing the farm – from the project plan­ning stage to turnkey com­ple­tion and grid con­nec­tion in March 2015. The com­pa­ny will remain respon­si­ble for tech­ni­cal oper­a­tions after the sale to CEE. CEE Oper­a­tions, the CEE sub­sidiary that spe­cialis­es in that field, will man­age the com­mer­cial side.

CEE and Bay­Wa r.e. have already joint­ly imple­ment­ed two solar projects in Ger­many and the UK solar park in Bices­ter and intend to con­tin­ue their part­ner­ship in Euro­pean coun­tries besides Ger­many. “Bay­Wa r.e. is a proven, expe­ri­enced and finan­cial­ly strong part­ner for CEE in the fur­ther expan­sion of its activ­i­ties in the UK,” explains Detlef Schreiber, CEE’s CEO. Matthias Taft, the board mem­ber at Bay­Wa AG respon­si­ble for ener­gy, is also very sat­is­fied: “Aston Clin­ton is the third suc­cess­ful project in which we have teamed up. We look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing to work well togeth­er on the basis of mutu­al trust. Through the tech­ni­cal oper­a­tions we will remain asso­ci­at­ed with the project.” Fol­low­ing the acqui­si­tion of the new park in Aston Clin­ton, CEE’s solar port­fo­lio has grown to about 260 MW.

In this case, debt fund­ing was pro­vid­ed by Ärztev­er­sorgung West­falen-Lippe (ÄVWL), an insti­tu­tion of the West­falen-Lippe Cham­ber of Doc­tors. It is the first time that CEE has obtained fund­ing for a project from a part­ner out­side the bank­ing sec­tor (pri­vate debt). “The col­lab­o­ra­tion with ÄVWL is very good and offers all involved par­ties an oppor­tu­ni­ty to earn more attrac­tive returns than from alter­na­tive project finance offers,” says Schreiber. The ben­e­fits are main­ly due to more favourable terms with regard to inter­est rates, matu­ri­ty and repay­ment struc­ture than those offered by con­ven­tion­al banks.

In the UK, solar PV farms with a total capac­i­ty of eight gigawatts (GW) are cur­rent­ly installed. Installed pho­to­volta­ic capac­i­ty has dou­bled in the UK in just 12 months. The aim is to reach about 22 GW and a solar ener­gy share of 15 per­cent in total elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion by 2020.

Advis­ers to the Aston Clin­ton project

Media con­tact
Lampe Equi­ty Man­age­ment GmbH
Alexan­der Sti­er
phone: +49 (0)40 688 788 62
e‑mail: stier@lampe-equity.de