Mainstream Renewable Power sets sights on US wind sector

It may have been named and shamed this week as a high profile backer of coal-related projects, but banking giant Barclays was keen to point out yesterday that it is also spending heavily in the green energy sector, announcing that it has agreed to invest €20m in Irish firm Mainstream Renewable Power.

Under the terms of the deal, Barclays Capital has invested €20m in return for a 14.6 per cent stake in the firm and pledged to provide further investment later in the year. The bank has joined the company's management team and other close associates, many of whom previously built up wind farm operator Airtricity before it was sold to Scottish and Southern earlier this year, in a funding round worth €40m. The deal takes €72m the amount the company has raised since it was founded earlier this year.

"We've seen people take a pop at the banks this week, but we are very involved in the renewables space and this deal is further evidence of that," said a spokesman for Barclays Capital.

Mainstream Renewable Power's Emmet Curley said that having recently announced plans to invest in a 240MW renewable energy project in Chile the company is now looking to expand is international reach. "We are in advanced negotiations on some much larger deals, particularly in the US, and we're talking gigawatts not megawatts," he added. "We'd hope to make some announcements before the end of the year."

The company said that it would also use some of the funding to put down deposits on wind turbines for the new projects, suggesting that the company's focus is primarily on wind farm developments.

"We're focusing on wind at the moment," confirmed Curley. "We're also looking at projects in Europe and Australia and we've seen some good opportunities, but the real scale is in wind in the US."

He added that once the new project deals were finalised the company would undertake a further funding round to finance the projects. "We're going to go to investors with propositions base on the specific projects we have finalised," he said, adding that while amount the company would look to raise would be dependent on the nature of those projects it was likely to be "not too far off" the €200m that the company said it was looking to raise earlier this year.