Green Giraffe Sees Funds Available for EU Offshore Wind

Jérôme Guillet, Managing Director of Green Giraffe, was interviewed by Bloomberg in April 2012 and discusses the availability of financing for offshore wind projects.

“Developers of offshore wind power stations in Europe will be able to find the “tens of billions of euros” they need to build the capacity planned even though banks are lending less, said Green Giraffe.”

“Available funds are growing alongside the industry,” Jerome Guillet, managing director of the Paris-based company that advises on wind projects, said by e-mail. “They will come from the traditional investors in the sectors such as utilities and from third parties” ranging from infrastructure to pension funds, he said.

Investors including Japanese trading house Marubeni Corp. (8002) and pension funds including PensionDanmark A/S are channeling money into European wind projects to tap long-term returns. Britain and Germany are leading construction of 35.5 gigawatts of offshore wind plants by 2020, requiring about 127 billion euros ($166 billion) of investment, according to Bloomberg New Energy (NENE) Finance. The facilities will provide 3.2 percent of the European Union’s electricity demand.

“Funding, whether debt finance, equity or other hybrid forms, is there for good projects and will continue to be as the industry grows,” he said. This is despite a “general perception” of financing shortages caused by the European debt crisis, he said. Third-party funding has actually outpaced industry growth in the past two years, he said.

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Jérôme Guillet co-founded Green Giraffe in 2010 and was a Managing Director until 2021.