Global wind and solar company Mainstream Renewable Power has raised $117.5m investment deal from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the $177.5m of equity in the Lekela Power platform.
The $117.5 will come from RBF and the other investors, and $60m from Mainstream itself to finance it’s continued expansion of the Lekela Power platform, a joint venture with private equity firm Actis. The funding package will help Lekela meet its goal of constructing over 1.3GW of new power capacity in Africa by 2018, while addressing the challenge of climate change.
Other investors included IFC, the IFC African, Latin American and Caribbean Fund (ALAC) and the IFC Catalyst Fund, two funds managed by IFC Asset Management Company, Ascension Investment Management and Sanlam.
The deal will allow Lekela to continue to build its pipeline of wind and solar projects in Africa. The platform plans to build four more wind farms in South Africa, a wind farm and two solar plants in Egypt, as well as wind farms in Senegal and Ghana.
Mainstream and Lekela are helping to fulfil the objectives of a series of key international initiatives, including the Obama Administration’s Power Africa, which aims to add 30,000MW of cleaner power generation through government and private partnerships, and the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All, which seeks to achieve universal access to power by 2030. Energy poverty has been recognised as one of the key challenges for Africa, with an estimated two thirds of people in Sub-Saharan Africa having no regular access to electricity.
