Coillte also revealed that it may consider selling a part or all of its existing wind assets among other options for the financing of the new pipeline of wind facilities. The company has selected IBI Corporate Finance and Capricorn to advise it in this regard.
About one-third of Ireland’s 3GW of wind farms in operation are located on lands owned by Coillte including the 169MW Galway Wind Park, which is considered to be the biggest wind farm in Ireland.
Coillte chief executive Fergal Leamy said: “Coillte’s extensive land bank has enabled the company to develop a pipeline of 25 projects exceeding 1GW and the profile of these projects demonstrates significant diversity in terms of geographic split, size and wind resource.
“To put the scale of our ambition into context, 1GW would represent approximately 33% of Ireland’s current renewable energy production, providing enough power to fuel up to a million households annually and shows our commitment to sustainability and making a significant contribution to delivering Ireland’s renewable energy targets.”
Coillte plans to hold a competitive dialogue process with interested parties in the wind, solar and wider renewable energy industry in the near future to identify the best available partnership or joint venture models.
The company said that after the dialogue process is completed, a tender process will be held in 2018.
Coillte says that it will evaluate the existing operating wind farm portfolio and may look to include some or all of such assets into the tender process.
The company’s wind farm assets include Raheenleagh, Cloosh, Castlepook, Sliabh Bawn, Bunkimalta and Cullenagh wind farms which have a combined total capacity of over 300MW.
