Gore Street raises £3.5m to fund UK and international pipeline

Gore Street Energy Storage Fund has raised gross proceeds of £3.5 million through a new placing of ordinary shares.

The London Stock Exchange listed fund will issue 3,615,986 new ordinary shares priced at 95.5p per share.

The net proceeds raised from the new placing is to be used to fund investment opportunities from Gore Street’s pipeline of storage in the UK and internationally.

Applications have been made to the FCA for the Ordinary Shares to be admitted to the premium segment of the Official List and to the London Stock Exchange for the new shares to be admitted to trading on its main market for listed securities, the fund said.

Following admission, which is expected to become effective at 8:00am on 11 February 2020, the new shares will rank pari passu with the existing ordinary shares. This will take Gore Street’s issued share capital to 52,548,815 ordinary shares, none of which will be held in treasury, it said, with each share carrying one right to vote.

Alex O’Cinneide, CEO of Gore Street Capital, said the company is “delighted” to have had inbound interest form “significant institutions with strong ESG mandates”.

“We remain fully focused on being a critical part of the transition to a low carbon economy and these shareholders will help us achieve this more rapidly,” O’Cinneide continued.

Gore Street became the first listed fund targeting energy storage specifically in March 2018, but underwhelmed in its maiden fundraiser in May of that year, originally targeting £100 million before slashing it to £35 million.

Last year, it acquired a 160MW portfolio of battery storage projects in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. As part of this, it secured a £30 million commitment from Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency, and a further £9.5 million several months later in October 2019.

NEC Energy Solutions was awarded EPC and long-term O&M contracts for the 100MW of storage in Northern Ireland last month.