CEE acquires 18.5 megawatt UK solar farm from BayWa r.e.

Ham­burg, 14 Octo­ber 2014 – The Ham­burg pri­vate equi­ty com­pa­ny CEE has con­tin­ued its planned inter­na­tion­al expan­sion by acquir­ing the Bices­ter UK solar pho­to­volta­ic (PV) farm from Bay­Wa r.e. Espe­cial­ly high-qual­i­ty com­po­nents – Solar­world mod­ules and Pow­er One invert­ers – were installed at Bices­ter. With a capac­i­ty of 18.5 megawatts (MW) the solar farm will pro­duce about 17.5 mil­lion kilo­watt hours of elec­tric­i­ty a year from sun­light. This will suf­fice to sup­ply near­ly 3,500 four-per­son house­holds with green pow­er.

Bices­ter is CEE’s first Euro­pean solar PV invest­ment out­side Ger­many. Bay­Wa r.e. has already con­struct­ed five solar farms in the UK and has also devel­oped this park, which is sit­u­at­ed close to Oxford, from project plan­ning to turnkey con­struc­tion and grid con­nec­tion. After the sale to CEE, the com­pa­ny will con­tin­ue to man­age the tech­ni­cal and com­mer­cial oper­a­tions. Debt fund­ing in this case has been pro­vid­ed by Bay­ern LB. CEE and Bay­Wa r.e. have already com­plet­ed two suc­cess­ful projects in Ger­many and intend to con­tin­ue to col­lab­o­rate in oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries.

“We have found an expe­ri­enced and finan­cial­ly strong part­ner in Bay­Wa r.e. for our entry into the Eng­lish mar­ket. Its exper­tise and way of work­ing fit in very well with CEE and its require­ments,” explains Detlef Schreiber, CEE’s CEO. Fol­low­ing the acqui­si­tion of the new park in Bices­ter, CEE’s solar PV port­fo­lio will grow to about 215 MW. “We are pleased that we are now also posi­tion­ing our­selves inter­na­tion­al­ly in the solar PV seg­ment with the Bices­ter solar project. The Eng­lish remu­ner­a­tion sys­tem is very mar­ket-ori­ent­ed, but with its mix of cer­tifi­cates and pow­er pur­chase agree­ments offers suf­fi­cient secu­ri­ty and attrac­tive returns,” says Schreiber.

PV sys­tems with a total capac­i­ty of 5 gigawatts (GW) are cur­rent­ly installed in the UK. With more than one gigawatt of new instal­la­tions in the first half of 2014, the UK was the Euro­pean mar­ket leader in addi­tion­al PV capac­i­ty. The goal is to achieve 22 GW and a mar­ket share of 15% per­cent in total pow­er con­sump­tion by 2020.

Advis­ers to the Bices­ter project