Macquarie Group, Australia’s leading investment bank, is seeking to solidify its presence in the renewable energy industry, with a purchase of the solar team and portfolio of Conergy Asia & ME. The portfolio includes solar development assets in the Asia Pacific region, commercial, technical and energy storage capabilities, and an asset monitoring centre.
Conergy’s Asia business will be purchased by Green Investment Group (GIG), Macquarie Capital’s global green investment platform, from U.S.-based financial giants Tennenbaum Capital Partners and Goldman Sachs for an undisclosed sum.
GIG was originally created by the UK government in 2012 as the world’s first bank dedicated to supporting green infrastructure investments. It was sold to Macquarie Group in 2017 for £2.3 billion.
The acquisition of Conergy solar portfolio will complement GIG’s existing expertise in wind, waste-from-energy and disruptive green energy technologies.
“We are pleased to enhance our solar energy capabilities from development through to design, engineering, procurement and delivery management, to build on Macquarie Capital’s solar energy track record across Asia Pacific,” said Neil Arora, Head of Macquarie Capital for Asia and the Middle East.
“Today’s acquisition will also further strengthen our battery storage expertise and allow us to pursue other investment opportunities in a rapidly-growing region for the renewables sector,“ she said.
One of the projects in Conergy’s portfolio is the recently completed Lakeland project in Northern Queensland, Australia’s first large scale solar+storage array comprising 10.8 MW of solar collocated with 1.4 MW / 5.3 MWh battery storage system. The project was delivered by Germany’s companies Conergy and Autarsys in collaboration with ARENA, which provided a $17.4 million grant towards the $42.5 million project.
“Conergy has had extensive solar experience in the Asia Pacific market and our employees have a strong reputation in the region. Given Macquarie’s green investment credentials and activity in the sector, we are excited to join Macquarie and leverage our capabilities to help accelerate Macquarie’s aspirations in solar,” said Alexander Lenz, CEO of Conergy.
Moreover, Conergy employees located in Singapore, Australia, Japan, Germany and the Philippines will join GIG, adding a team of 88 professionals with extensive experience in developing over 500MW of solar energy projects across Asia Pacific, and a total of 2GW globally.
“This acquisition underscores our ambition for GIG to advance its position as a world leading developer and investor in green energy projects in Asia and globally – across offshore wind, onshore wind, solar, waste to energy, battery storage and energy efficiency. I’m delighted to welcome the Conergy team to GIG,” said Daniel Wong, Global Co-Head of Infrastructure and Energy for Macquarie Capital.
Macquarie and GIG are currently developing a pipeline of over 7GW of renewable energy projects.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.