Image: Energy Solutions.
Pensions Infrastructure Platform (PiP) has provided £20.3 million of debt capital to refinance almost 2,000 rooftop solar assets owned by Foresight on behalf of the railways pension scheme, RPMI Railpen.
The inflation linked finance, repayable over 19.5 years, has been used for a portfolio of 1,911 solar roofs totaling a combined capacity of 7.15 MWp. The systems are deployed across England and Wales and benefit from the UK’s feed-in tariff, although the rates applied to each system have not been disclosed.
Chris Hitchen, chief executive of RPMI Railpen, said: “This debt investment will deliver exactly the secure, long term, inflation-linked cash flows that will help the railways pension schemes achieve our mission to pay members’ pensions securely, affordably and sustainably.
“As a founding investor of PiP we are delighted it has developed the capabilities to effectively source and execute transactions such as this – a key objective of our support for its original establishment.”
PiP was set up by pension schemes to facilitate long term investment into UK infrastructure and according to Mike Weston, chief executive of PiP, this latest refinancing shows the success of the platform model.
“This is a real example of the power of the PiP platform. A UK pension scheme has been able to utilise the platform structure and expertise they helped build at PiP to access a proprietary infrastructure investment opportunity that is a great fit with their scheme specific investment strategy,” he said.