Wednesday 25th April 2018

Wind Watch

Wind Watch is published every Monday, Thursday and Friday.

Until then, please have a look at one of our latest member Q&As, in which Frances Salter spoke to Peter Bachmann of Scottish Equity Partners. Here's an excerpt and you can read the full piece by clicking on the link below.

Member Q&A: Peter Bachmann,
Scottish Equity Partners
By Frances Salter

Of the deals you’ve worked on, which is your favourite and why?

That’s a wind farm which we developed in the Republic of Ireland that got energised just before Christmas last year, called Curraghderrig Windfarm - named after the area which it sits on the north-west coast of Ireland.

The reason it was probably my favourite deal was that it combined all the things I really enjoy. It involved building a relationship with a developer in the Republic of Ireland, and the discussion started off looking quite openly at opportunities. Then this particular project came up: they’d described it as shovel-ready in October/November 2016, then it took us until June 2017 to get to financial close.

We had to do a lot of work to get the contractual suite in shape, and had to enter into lots of negotiations with residents about noise mitigation and other things to facilitate the project. It also involved securing project finance from the Bank of Ireland which was an in-depth process and not as advanced as we had been told.

At a deal level it involved a back-to-back special purchase agreements with the original developers, who were then selling the project to Rengen, who were then selling the project to us. So it was quite a complicated structure. It required a lot of heavy lifting on a wide range of issues, but ultimately it was successful and came to a financial close, and then recently to an operational phase, so that was really pleasing.

When we went to the site for the first time to see the turbines...