SgurrEnergy advises on Germany’s first project financed offshore wind farm

22 December 2010

SgurrEnergy was commissioned as technical advisor to a club of origination banks with German project and export finance bank KfW IPEX-Bank acting as Technical Bank for the Lenders  to provide the technical due diligence for their investment in Phase 1 of the Borkum West II Offshore Wind Farm, a development by Trianel Windkraftwerk Borkum GmbH.

The project achieved financial close on Friday 17 December 2010. This is the first such offshore wind farm in German waters to achieve financial close using non-recourse project finance.

As technical advisor, SgurrEnergy in conjunction with Intertek-Metoc, provided a wide range of services to the Lenders including appraisal of the technical project design, engineering and construction contracts, vendor acceptance testing and a review of wind turbine and balance of plant equipment suppliers. Energy yield verification was also conducted as part of the technical advisor role, along with a review of operational data and wind turbine performance at existing sites. Our finance experts also provided commentary on the CAPEX and OPEX models and made appropriate recommendations regarding the sizing of the contingency and maintenance reserve accounts.

The project was managed by SgurrEnergy's in-house due diligence experts and a complementary team of multi-disciplinary engineers and wind analysis specialists. Having expert multi-lingual staff providing technical advisory services is one of our key strengths in the international financial market. This project marks another high profile addition to our global track record in providing advisory services and is one of the larger German offshore wind projects that we have helped bring to financial close to date.

Ian Irvine, technical director at SgurrEnergy commented, "As with any project dealing with a new to market wind turbine model deployed in an offshore location, our combination of technical and commercial expertise, and flexibility in rising to the challenges of the due diligence process, was key to successful delivery, as was the continued good relations we maintained with all parties throughout ".

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