Wind Capital Group Secures $240M In Construction, Term Loans
Dow Jones Clean Technology Insight : October 27 2009
By Yuliya Chernova
Wind Capital Group, a subsidiary of NTR PLC, said Monday it secured $240 million in project debt financing to support its 150-megawatt project in Missouri. Lead arrangers for the financing were Nord/LB, Bayern LB, Rabobank Group, Banco Santander and Union Bank. The deal includes construction and term loans. The project plans to apply for Treasury grants, instead of production tax credits, under a stimulus package program, according to a Wind Capital statement. The debt facilities include a loan that will be repaid by the Treasury grant, according to a Wind Capital representative. Terms of the financing weren’t disclosed.
A typical interest rate on a wind project currently is around 300 basis points above the London interbank offered rate, according to presenters at a recent American Wind Energy Association event. That’s a good estimate on the terms of this deal, as well, according to the representative. Club deals such as this financing have become typical in the wind industry as individual banks are usually unwilling to underwrite a project on their own.
Ciaran O’Brien, chief financial officer at Wind Capital, said at the AWEA event that he has met more loan officers in the past eight months than in the previous 10 years, as he has been working on putting deals together. The developer has been in discussions with lenders since the first quarter of this year on this new deal, and finalized the terms quickly after terms of the Treasury grant program came out in late July, according to the representative.
The new deal will finance the construction of Lost Creek, a wind project that went into construction in De Kalb County, Mo., in July. It’s due to be completed in the late spring of 2010. It will use 100 1.5 MW wind turbines from General Electric Co. Wind Capital will own and operate the project, in its first such move, as it previously just developed projects and sold them off. It will own and operate all projects in the future, according to the representative. The company has developed more than 900 MW of wind projects in the Midwest and has a pipeline of more than 2,700 MW, according to a statement.
Dublin-based NTR, a developer and operator of renewable energy and waste-management projects, invested $150 million in Wind Capital last year, when the company also acquired 150 MW worth of wind turbines from General Electric Co.