We’re delighted to announce the first addition to the Lough Shore Investments portfolio. Later today we will formally announce a strategic investment in a home grown Northern Irish renewable energy company Simple Power.
Simple Power offers a fresh approach to small-scale on-shore renewable energy generation. Adopting a single turbine approach, Simple Power affords landowners and farmers the opportunity to generate wind energy on their own land.
Over the next four years, Simple Power plans to invest over £50 million in Northern Irish wind energy, producing more than 50 MW of wind energy annually by 2015.
This investment will assist greatly in accelerating on-shore wind development here in Northern Ireland. In 2010, renewable energy sources accounted for just under 10% of all electricity consumed in Northern Ireland and a large part of this came from on-shore wind. Northern Ireland has set a target to raise this to 40% by 2020, Simple Power is committed to making this happen. At the very core of this commitment we see an opportunity to drive both economic prosperity and environmental development here in Northern Ireland.
So, it’s clear wind energy makes sense but why Simple Power?
At Lough Shore Investments we wanted to open with a project that reflected our environmental and ethical convictions and provided a source of revenue for farmers and the rural communities in Northern Ireland. Equally important it had to make great business sense and have the ability to attract substantial investment from outside the province, while having the potential for an IPO on the London Stock Exchange (or AIM).
We’ve been working very closely with Paul Carson, Simple Power CEO, since June 2010 to develop the business model so it is a partnership in the most complete sense.
The first tenet of our approach is to give the farmers a fair deal and make it easy for them to reap the benefits. Renewable energy is a great opportunity for landowners across Northern Ireland to maximize the return from their land for the next twenty-five to thirty years; especially those in less favored areas. Unfortunately, this opportunity is full of pitfalls; there is hardly a farmer in Northern Ireland who hasn’t been approached by a ‘carpet bagger’ looking for a quick deal on a site option, with confusing terms and questionable claims. Our advice to farmers is to be very careful indeed, shop around, only deal with credible firms, always engage a lawyer and ensure they fully understand what they are signing up to.
Second and equally important we wear our environmental credentials on our sleeves. We take the view that bad projects undermine the whole renewable sector, so all participants need to be vigilant and the industry needs to self police. The most obvious example is planning. We’ve done some work and indentified some 2,500 suitable sites for wind turbines in Northern Ireland that respect all the key planning and landscape designations. In our view renewable energy can coexist within our landscape and there is no need to push the boundaries of the planning designations to thrive.
Finally, with Simple Power we saw the opportunity to build a scalable business vehicle with the potential to funnel substantial amounts of inward investment into Northern Ireland, delivering returns in keeping with the leading companies on the AIM and LSE. We view medium scale wind in Northern Ireland as just the beginning and believe the model can be scaled across the British Isles and into mainland Europe. There are many other opportunities in Ireland where we can partner with farmers and rural entrepreneurs to deliver solutions across the biomass and AD spheres; both of which are now central to economic and rural development policy.
From the outset, Simple Power have partnered with Lough Shore Investments to develop a model that will allow them not only to grow a business, but to become a great one. We don’t consider Lough Shore Investment’s biggest asset to be capital, we consider it to be a solid understanding of the key hurdles to growing a business from early stage to exit or IPO.
Simple Power has adopted the Lough Shore Investments model, putting in place a company-wide infrastructure vital to attracting larger funds. This best practice management and governance will be a vital component of our portfolio going forward as it allows for future large-scale fundraising in other key jurisdictions such as the US.
For Lough Shore Investment, this is the Simple Power USP. They have created a vehicle that is focused on building a great business and making it accessible to the global capital markets. Here’s to winds of change, in every sense, here in Northern Ireland.
– Danny Moore