Pacific Green has secured a combined £123.5 million (US$153 million) facility to support construction of its 1.5-hour, 249MW/373.5MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) in Kent, UK.
Retail banking group NatWest organised the facility acting as Lead Structuring Bank, Agent, Security Trustee and Hedging Counterparty, coordinating syndicate financing of a £120 million capex loan and a £3.5 million value-added tax (VAT) facility for Sheaf Energy Park – a wholly owned subsidiary of Pacific Green Technologies Ltd.
Alongside NatWest in the syndicate sits UK Infrastructure Bank (UIB), with each bank holding a 50% share in the capex loan, whilst the VAT facility is solely funded by NatWest.
The site in southern England is expected to go live in July 2025.
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“It’s great to support the new Sheaf Energy Park project and continue to help the decarbonisation agenda of the UK, working alongside UKIB to give Pacific Green a market leading debt structure that helps them bring in a further 249MW of flexible generation assets to the grid,” said Jacob Lloyd, head of specialist asset finance at NatWest.
“BESS continues to play a big role in the UK’s grid stability, and we look forward to working further with Pacific Green on the future of energy transition.”
Pacific Green recently sold its Richborough Energy Park 99MWh BESS site, also in the English county of Kent, with Sosteneo Fund HoldCo S.à.r.l. purchasing 100% of Pacific Green’s shares in the site, which is set to become operational before the end of this year.
Its 100% interest in Sheaf Energy Park was acquired from project originator Tupa Energy for £7.5 million in late 2022 and is the result of a framework agreement signed in March 2021 with its fellow developer. Tupa Energy agreed to source projects for Pacific Green to work on, with the latter aiming to deploy 1.1GW of storage in the UK market. An agreement that Sheaf Energy Park would be one of those was signed in September of that year.
The developer also announced its “strategic entry” into the Australian market in early October, securing land in the state of Victoria on which it said up to 1GW/2.5GWh of BESS could be developed in so-called ‘Energy Parks’.
This story first appeared on Solar Power Portal.
Additional reporting for Energy-Storage.news by Andy Colthorpe.
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