SgurrEnergy advise on €670m European solar acquisition

SgurrEnergy was commissioned as technical advisor to private equity company Terra Firma Capital Partners for a reported €620 - €670m investmentin Rete Rinnovabile, a solar photovoltaic generation business and portfolio in Italy.The takeover from Terna, Italy’s national grid operator is potentially the biggest acquisition of a solar power generation company in Europe and will capitalise on the Italian government’s recently announced revised feed-in tariffs.

As technical advisor, SgurrEnergy provided a wide range of services to Terra Firma including: appraisal of the engineering contracts, vendor acceptance testing and a review of solar equipment suppliers.   Energy yield verification was also conducted as part of the technical advisor role, along with a review of operational data and site performance at key sites. The Rete Rinnovabile portfolio comprised of over 50 sites most of which are on previously disused land, with an installed peak generation energy capacity in excess of 150MW. 

The project was managed by SgurrEnergy’s in-house solar experts and a complementary team of multi-disciplinary engineers.  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 to the financial market and is one of the biggest solar projects that we have been involved with to date.

Project Manager at SgurrEnergy, Chris Parcell commented, “As with any project dealing with a large number of sites at various stages of development, our combination of solar technical and commercial expertise was key to successful delivery, being able to speak Italian was also a key benefit for SgurrEnergy”.

SgurrEnergy were also commissioned by Terra Firma as due diligence experts in the successful $350m buy-out of Everpower, the US wind farm developer, in December 2009.

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