PiP fund refinance rooftop solar portfolio
Pensions Infrastructure Platform (PiP), a dedicated infrastructure investment manager established by pension schemes, for pension schemes to facilitate long term investment into UK infrastructure, has worked on behalf of RPMI Railpen, to provide £20.3 million (US$25.1 million) of inflation linked debt capital in order to refinance a portfolio of 1,911 rooftop solar assets owned by Foresight.
The transaction was arranged by Novatio Capital Limited and is similar to an investment made by the PiP Multi-Strategy Infrastructure Fund earlier this year.
The rooftop assets are geographically distributed across England and Wales, with a total installed capacity of 7.15 MWp and benefiting from the UK’s feed in tariff regime. The financing is repayable over 19.5 years. Eversheds, Everoze and Marsh Limited advised PiP on the transaction.
Novatio Capital Limited trading as The Renewable Financing Company acted as the Arranger of the Loan Facility.
Mike Weston, Chief Executive PiP, said:
“This is a real example of the power of the PiP platform. A UK pension scheme has been able to utilise the platform structure and expertise they helped build at PiP to access a proprietory infrastructure investment opportunity that is a great fit with their scheme specific investment strategy.”
Chris Hitchen, CEO RPMI Railpen, said:
“This debt investment will deliver exactly the secure, long term, inflation-linked cash flows that will help the railways pension schemes achieve our mission to pay members’ pensions securely, affordably and sustainably. As a Founding Investor of PiP we are delighted it has developed the capabilities to effectively source and execute transactions such as this – a key objective of our support for its original establishment.”
Justin May, Executive Director, Novatio Capital Limited, said:
“We are delighted to have worked with PiP again. All parties in this transaction have been able to benefit from the experience gained from working together on a previous transaction we executed this summer.”
