The debt raise is ground breaking in the battery storage market. Zenobē Energy is one of the UK’s first battery storage companies to successfully raise limited recourse debt financing for projects that trade on a predominantly merchant basis.
The debt has been structured in three tranches:
- A term loan secured against a portion of Zenobē Energy’s existing battery storage portfolio, which will be drawn on day one with the proceeds to be used to finance growth within the group, including
- behind the meter services offered to commercial and industrial customers to improve the resilience of their power supply and reduce energy costs,
- financing the construction and/or purchase of new grid scale battery storage projects; and
- providing Zenobē’s services to the fleet vehicle sector including the design, ownership, operation and financing of batteries and charging infrastructure with associated software as a service as well as financing the battery on the bus and providing this as a service to operators;
- A committed facility available to finance construction of new grid scale battery projects as Zenobē Energy looks to build out its pipeline of grid scale battery storage projects; and
- An accordion.
Zenobē Energy has 73MW of operational grid-scale battery capacity and has been at the forefront of developing software to optimise the use of batteries, for instance, by developing software to dispatch Fast Reserve services to the National Grid, which can deliver over 50MW of reserve power in less than five seconds.
The Burges Salmon team that advised Zenobē Energy included senior associates Alison Logan (Banking) and Daniel Ballard (Projects), and partner Euan Bremner and solicitor Shalini Jagmohan (Real Estate). This latest advice follows the firm’s Energy team advising Zenobē Energy at the beginning of 2019 to help it successfully raise a facility of up to £35 million of equity from JERA Co. Inc. and TEPCO Power Grid Inc.
Nicholas Beatty, Founder Director, Zenobē Energy says: “The Burges Salmon team, alongside our other advisers, played a vital role in supporting Zenobē Energy with its refinancing. Throughout the transaction the team provided us with insightful and valuable legal advice. This ground-breaking transaction reinforces Zenobē Energy’s reputation as an innovator in the energy storage market. The debt raised will be crucial in allowing us to achieve our growth ambitions, both within our IFM business and fast developing bus EV fleet business as well as elsewhere in the group.”