+ The UK's £4.6bn Lancashire County Pension Fund has invested in a 23.5 year, £12m ($18m) solar bond, issued by a community-owned solar power plant in Oxfordshire.
Canadian ratings agency DBRS announced on Thursday that it had just rated as BBB a bond to be released by Canada's Brookfield Renewable Energy. The 17 year, C$454m, wind bond will allow Brookfield to re-finance its 165.6 MW Comber wind project. The project was completed in November 2011.
This week Chinese wind power developer, Longyuan Power closed a $400m senior hybrid bond deal (a mixture of debt and equity where holders are given the option to convert the bond into equity after a specified time period).
- I’m in Qatar, a place slightly smaller than Connecticut, prosaically described in my travel guide app as “mainly flat and barren desert, covered with loose sand and gravel”. There’s not a lot of desert left in its capital, Doha, just a vast sea of choked-up highways (serious SUV traffic!) and low-rise buildings punctuated by monumentalist skyscrapers, all thanks to huge natural gas resources. Pity we're going to have to leave a large part of that gas in the ground if we're going to avoid catastrophic climate change.
As you may recollect, we're keen on the idea of Green Sukuk (Sukuk are Shari'ah-compliant bonds), designed for Islamic investors and sovereign wealth funds. Environmental protection is important in Islamic teaching.
