NextPower V ESG (NPV ESG), an international fund operated by UK-headquartered investment firm NextEnergy Capital (NEC), has acquired a 248MW Spanish solar PV portfolio.
The portfolio consists of 12 projects in north-eastern Spain, and this is the fourth investment the fund has made. Since its inception, the fund has identified 18GW of what NEC calls “high-quality, attractive investment opportunities,” and the company plans to invest in as much as 5GW of renewable power generation capacity through the NPV ESG fund.
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“NPV ESG continues to go from strength to strength,” said NEC managing partner and CIO Aldo Beolichini. “This latest investment in Spain shortly follows the recent acquisition in Poland which again demonstrates NEC’s ability to deploy capital quickly and efficiently, whilst also highlighting NEC as a market leader in the solar space with over 360MW of capacity added to NPV ESG in the last 12 weeks.”
As Beolichini says, NEC has made a number of investments through the NPV ESG. Last December, the company acquired a 100MW project in the US state of Florida, the investment fund’s first acquisition; and earlier this year, the fund commissioned two PV plants, with a combined capacity of 260MW, in Spain and Portugal.
“NEC currently manages [around] 500MW of operating solar assets in this geography which remains an attractive market to deploy capital,” added Antonio Salvati, managing director of NPV ESG. “We expect to continue investing in Iberia through our Madrid office and as NPV ESG currently has multiple additional projects under advanced negotiation in the region.”
To support these projects, the NPV ESG fund has raised around US$750 million in financing commitments, with investors including KLP, a German pension fund, and what NEC calls a “large Nordic pension fund”. NEC plans to roughly double the amount of money in the fund to around US$1.5 billion by the end of its life, schedule for 2033, as it looks to expand on its renewable energy investments.
These investments come as more money than ever before flows into the solar sector. Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that it expects solar PV investment to reach US$500 billion, more than will be invested into any other single technology, and roughly one-quarter of the world’s total clean energy investments made in 2024.
