Prime Capital has completed the Third Closing of its commingled infrastructure fund. With this Closing PGEIF reached total commitments of EUR342 million.
The fund was launched in June 2020 and focuses on wind-powered energy assets in the Nordic countries. It aims to secure assets in their late development stage and exploit their full return potential by employing a value-add strategy. Prime Capital identifies and secures attractive opportunities at an early stage, optimising all technical and commercial aspects of the projects, including financing and power purchase agreements. It seeks to build its projects with the most efficient technology on the market. This approach has been successfully applied in several large-scale transactions so far.
“Our value-add strategy, coupled with the economies of scale achievable in the Nordics and the region’s excellent wind resources, enables us to achieve superior market returns compared to other renewable energy investments in Europe, as we build at the lowest levelised cost of electricity”, says Dr Mathias Bimberg, Head of Infrastructure at Prime Capital. “We are also very happy to have acquired our second investment in the fund, from one of the pioneers of wind development in Europe, CPC Germania. The 192MW project is located in Finland and is due to reach commissioning at the beginning of 2023.”
In addition, the fund is the first infrastructure equity fund that received a Second Party Opinion from Sustainalytics, a global leader in ESG research, ratings and analysis. According to Sustainalytics, the fund aligns with their principles for green and responsible investments. It creates significant positive impact with respect to the EU’s climate change mitigation target and has also been categorised as an impact (“Article 9”) fund according to the strict requirements of the EU’s recently introduced Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), as it invests in sustainable business activities aligned with the EU taxonomy.
In 2021, Prime Capital also received several prestigious awards for investing in the renewable energy sector, which is a testament to its activities in recent years. Both the “Global and European Deal of the Year Award” of the 12th annual global Infrastructure Awards went to project Björnberget, PGEIF’s seed investment, a 372MW onshore wind park in Central Sweden. The project is expected to reach commercial operation at the beginning of 2023 and will produce approximately 1.1TWh of clean electricity annually. Furthermore, Prime Capital was awarded as “Investor of the Year” at the A Word About Wind Investment Awards 2021.
“We are pleased to announce the Third Closing of our successful infrastructure fund, which is another proof for our achievements in realising sustainable projects at attractive returns. In addition, we are delighted that our “Article 9 fund” fulfils the high standards of the EU requirements,” adds Andreas Kalusche, CEO at Prime Capital. “Not only our infrastructure team, but also our other investment teams will continue to extend our activities in this segment in the future, as sustainable investing has gained immensely in importance in recent years. In Europe, and in particular in Scandinavia, we have in the meantime become a very sizeable and recognised player.”
