Renewco’s chair Gary Le Sueur and CEO Gavin McCallum. Image: Renewco Power.

A new renewables firm with the backing of SSE has been launched with a focus on the roll-out of large-scale solar and wind farms across the UK and Europe.

Edinburgh-based Renewco Power is targeting the development of more than 4GW within five years, making use of an initial £24 million funding from the energy giant. It already has 1GW of early stage projects.

Renewco Power is being launched by Frans van den Heuvel, former CEO of Solarcentury, and Alan Baker, former CEO of Airtricity-Scotland and Forsa Energy. They have brought together a team that includes Gavin McCallum, formerly of BP Alternative Energy as CEO, Alp Karli, the founder of Value Renewables, as chief commercial officer, and Romain Keyen, formerly of Scottish Equity Partners (SEP), as chief investment officer.

Collectively the team has successfully developed more than 10GW of renewables in over 50 countries. It was brought together by Gary Le Sueur, a former partner of SEP who recently founded clean energy investment company Corran Capital. Le Sueur is chair of Renewco, and will be joined by SGN Smart’s Derrick Allan on the board.

“Renewco has a unique blend of entrepreneurial talent with deep power sector and financial expertise which we will use to accelerate new developments across Europe,” said the company’s CEO McCallum. “We will be growing our team over the coming months, adding further commercial expertise to accelerate the delivery of our strategy.”