Gresham House Energy Storage Fund has announced the placing of up to £57.8 million of new shares – 56.2 million at a price of 103 pence each.
Since its creation, the fund has raised almost £165 million from investors, including £100 million through its initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange in November and £15.3 million in a second issuance in July.
The additional funding will be used to purchase a pipeline of projects being developed exclusively for the fund by its manager Gresham House and Noriker Power.
Subject to the successful commissioning and purchase of the projects, some of which are already under construction, the firm expects to have 229MW of operational assets by the end of the first quarter of 2020.
Gresham House is also scoping out a further four operational energy storage facilities with a combined capacity of 95MW and has six projects in development with a total capacity of 240MW.
John Leggate, chairman of Gresham House Energy Storage Fund, said: “Today’s announcement reflects the company’s ambitions to grow materially and marks another positive stride forward as we cement our position as the most established energy storage fund in the UK.
“The continuing shift towards a reduced carbon national energy portfolio urgently demands more utility scale batteries. The National Grid outage on 9 August provided confirmatory evidence that investment in energy storage is key to the security of this vital element of the UK’s critical national infrastructure.”
The latest share issuance will close at noon on 10 October. If fully subscribed, it will bring the total capital raised by the fund to in the region of £220 million.
The fund had original planned to raise £200 million over its initial year-long issuance programme and as such will need to gain approval from shareholders for the placing of 20 million additional shares.
Meanwhile, fund manager Glenmont Partners has completed the sale to Foresight Group of the Gruig (25MW) and Todmorden Moor (12.5MW) onshore windfarms in Northern Ireland and West Yorkshire respectively.
Following its recent sale of the Gortahile windfarm in Ireland to Greencoat Renewables, Glenmort Partners has now completely divested its wind assets on the British Isles.
Managing partner and chief executive, Joost Bergsma, said: “We are delighted to complete the sale of both Gruig and Todmorden Moor wind farms to Foresight.
“The sale of our remaining UK wind assets reinforces Glennmont’s reputation for providing stable, predictable returns on investment in clean energy infrastructure, and underlines our continued success in divesting from Fund I.”