+ 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.
The £6 bn Pension Insurance Corporation (PIC) has bought up as a private placement the first ever UK publicly-listed solar bond, a £40m ($64m), 24 year bond linked to two 5 MW solar plants in Somerset owned by Solar Power Generation.
Canada’s Next Era Energy recently issued an asset-backed $175m, 19 year solar bond. Rating BBB, interest rate 4.80%.
> In Korea, in the centre of dynamic Seoul, Jeffrey Sachs has just spelt out the painful truth in his speech to the Global Green Growth Summit:
“We are in deep trouble. Things are not working to fix the biggest problem we’ve had to fix. We have failed to do what, 20 years ago, we set out to do. We have squandered that 20 years.
This is an issue where you can feel good about a demonstration project here and there; but the scale of the impact is overwhelming us all.
Warren Buffet is a famous proponent of value investing and he surely received a sign of the value in solar investments over fossil fuels last week. The MidAmerican Energy $850m Topaz solar project bond we mentioned a couple of weeks ago was so successful that a second tranche is expected to cover the remaining debt of the project. The offer was oversubscribed by $400m which would have mopped up the total $1.2bn of debt in the project; Buffet is a shareholder in MidAmerican.
