Hamburg private equity firm CEE acquires three solar farms in France and continues to successfully expand its portfolio in Europe

Ham­burg, 20 Octo­ber 2014 – The Ham­burg pri­vate equi­ty com­pa­ny CEE is increas­ing its invest­ment in France and is acquir­ing three solar farms with a total capac­i­ty of 19.6 megawatts (MW). Specif­i­cal­ly, these are Espar­ron 1 (8.6 MW), Espar­ron 2 (5.1 MW) and Saint-Hilaire (5.9 MW). The pho­to­volta­ic (PV) parks Espar­ron 1 and 2 are locat­ed about 70 km to the north west of Mar­seille in the south of France. Saint-Hilaire is close to Lyon. All three parks are already con­nect­ed to the grid and have been feed­ing around 28 mil­lion kilo­watt hours of green elec­tric­i­ty into the region­al grids each year since the start of 2012. Fol­low­ing their acqui­si­tion, CEE’s solar PV port­fo­lio has now grown to 24 farms with a total capac­i­ty of 235 MW. The Ham­burg-based com­pa­ny is pur­chas­ing the three French solar farms from the 123Venture Group and Solairdi­rect SA, Paris. The CEE sub­sidiary CEE Oper­a­tions (CEEO) will be respon­si­ble for the com­mer­cial man­age­ment togeth­er with Solairedi­rect. The French firm will also remain respon­si­ble for the tech­ni­cal oper­a­tions.

“Now that CEE is already suc­cess­ful­ly rep­re­sent­ed in the French wind sec­tor, we are pleased to have suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed our entry into the solar PV sec­tor with three projects,” explains Detlef Schreiber, CEE’s CEO. “With an aver­age spe­cif­ic yield of more than 1,000 kilo­watt hours per kilo­watt peak and secure, long-term remu­ner­a­tion of 34 cents per kilo­watt hour, our French solar PV parks rep­re­sent an attrac­tive addi­tion to CEE’s exist­ing pho­to­volta­ic port­fo­lio.”

In France, renew­able ener­gies cur­rent­ly account for only about 19 per­cent of pow­er gen­er­a­tion. The aim is to raise the share to 23 per­cent by 2020 (source: Ger­many Trade & Invest) and incen­tives are offered to achieve the tar­get. Accord­ing to the lat­est sta­tis­tics of the Gen­er­al Com­mis­sion for Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment (CGDD), installed pho­to­volta­ic capac­i­ty hit the 5 gigawatt mark in June 2014. The French solar PV mar­ket is attrac­tive to investors main­ly because of the com­par­a­tive­ly high lev­els of solar radi­a­tion and secure remu­ner­a­tion arrange­ments.

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