German asset manager Prime Capital has reached a €202m first closing of its Prime Green Energy Infrastructure Fund, which focuses on Nordic wind projects.
Prime Capital has already secured three seed investments for the fund, located in Sweden and Norway.
The first investment is planned to happen shortly after the first close and will take Prime Capital’s infrastructure track record to over 1.2GW of realised capacity.
Prime Capital is one of the largest investors in Nordic onshore wind projects.
The Prime Green Energy Infrastructure Fund aims to secure projects in their late development stage and “exploit their full return potential” through “optimisation of permits, layouts and technology, together with full contract tendering whilst striking the optimal balance between long-term financing and merchant risk”.
Prime Capital intends to raise a total of €500mn in subsequent closings of the fund and also has a “cooperation understanding” with Siemens Gamesa.
The investor’s recent transactions include the 290MW Nordlicht in Norway, which is nearing commissioning, and the 254MW Stavro in Sweden, which reached financial close last year.
Prime Capital infrastructure head Mathias Bimberg said: “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 to other renewable energy investments in Europe.
“At the same time, we are investing in some of the most stable global economies, with a strongly growing demand for electricity and ambitious climate goals.
“In the current economic environment driven by the Covid-19 pandemic, we can capitalise on the declining availability of long-term financing, and an increasing reluctance on the investor side driven by historically low power prices, due to our flexible value-add strategy.”
Several investors have seeded the fund and will join its advisory board.
They include Siemens Financial Services, and Nordrheinische Arzteversorgung, a doctors’ pension fund. Both have invested with Prime Capital in several Nordic projects before.
Prime capital CIO Werner Goricki added: “We are very pleased by the trust our investors have put in us, based on our recent transactions.
“Furthermore, we are delighted to launch this strategy in a format available to a wider institutional investor base, for whom a diversified access to large scale projects of this kind has not been easily possible.”