Mercom Capital Group has released its report on funding and merger and acquisition (M&A) activity for the wind sector in 2015. Total global corporate funding in the wind sector, including venture capital/private equity (VC), debt financing, and public market financing, raised by public companies shot up to a record US$ 15.4 billion, compared to US$ 11.8 billion in 2014.
Global VC investments rose to US$ 520 million in 14 deals in 2015. Wind downstream companies accounted for most of the VC funding with US$ 505 million of the US$ 520 million raised.
Wind corporate M&A activity in 2015 accounted for 48 transactions of which only 30 disclosed transaction amounts. Of the 48 M&A transactions, wind downstream companies accounted for 32 this year. The top three M&A transactions this year all involved wind downstream companies. The top M&A transaction in 2015 was the acquisition of Pacific Hydro by China’s State Power Investment Corporation for US$ 2 billion.
There were 154 wind project acquisitions in 2015 for nearly 30GW. Investment funds once again led project acquisitions with 9GW in 2015, followed by project developers with 8GW, utilities with 7GW and yieldcos with 5GW of wind project acquisitions. Of the 154 project acquisitions this year, 140 involved onshore wind projects. The largest disclosed project acquisition by dollar amount in 2015 was the US$ 2 billion acquisition of 930MW of wind projects from Invenergy Wind by TerraForm Power.
