Contracted cash flow
The longer and stronger the offtake, the lower the required return. A 15-year PPA with an industrial counterparty beats three years of spot exposure.
Asset classes · Infrastructure
Infrastructure & energy
Generation, grids, storage, fibre, transport and social infrastructure. Capital is plentiful — what is scarce are consented projects with a cash flow you can underwrite.
We act for developers, operators and owners who either need equity for the next build-out stage or want to sell a portfolio in full or in part. Typical mandates: ground-mounted and rooftop solar, wind farms in repowering, battery storage, heat networks, fibre clusters, charging infrastructure and data centres at the edge of real estate.
What gets valued here is not the site but the payment stream over 20 to 30 years. The revenue model decides everything: feed-in tariff, PPA, availability payment or concession, plus tenor, indexation and who carries volume risk. A project with a long-term corporate PPA and an investment-grade offtaker sits in a completely different return world than a merchant asset.
The second test is regulatory: consent status, grid connection point, connection agreement, site control through leasehold or easement. In practice projects fail on a missing grid connection or an undecided municipality — rarely on capital.
What we look at first
- Consent status and whether permits are final and binding
- Grid connection point, connection agreement and export capacity
- Revenue: feed-in tariff, PPA, availability payment or merchant share
- Site control: leases, leaseholds, easements and their terms
- O&M contracts and availability guarantees
- Decommissioning obligations and how they are secured
Key figures
- Ticket size
- EUR 10m – 400m
- Segments
- Solar, wind, storage, heat, fibre, transport
- Typical buyers
- Infra funds, utilities, insurers, municipal utilities
- Valuation basis
- DCF over contract term, IRR
- Capital structure
- Project finance, 65 – 85 % debt
- Process
- 4 – 8 months
Value drivers
What moves the price here
Grid connection
A binding connection agreement with a date is now the real value driver in many regions — not the land, not the technology.
Consent maturity
Half the purchase price sits between project idea and ready-to-build. Buyers pay for removed risk, not for potential.
Scalability
Clusters with the same technology and standard contracts sell as a platform and carry a premium over single assets.
Process
How a sale runs in this segment
- Step 01
Project review
Technology, consents, contracts, land and grid fully captured — with the gaps named openly.
- Step 02
Model and sensitivities
DCF over the contract term with scenarios for power price, availability, rates and operating cost.
- Step 03
Investor selection
Infra funds, utilities, insurers and strategic operators, split by risk profile and construction stage.
- Step 04
Indicative offers
Compared on return expectation, structure and security package, not on headline price alone.
- Step 05
Due diligence
Technical, legal and regulatory, usually with a specialist adviser per workstream.
- Step 06
Signing and handover
SPA or investment agreement, transfer of permits, O&M and securities.
From practice
What we see in real deals
Grid first, everything else second
We ask about the connection agreement in the first call. Without a solid grid connection point any price is speculation, and experienced buyers walk immediately.
Show the merchant share honestly
Optimistic power curves lose the argument in diligence. Model conservatively and present the upside separately.
Decommissioning bites late
Removal bonds and restoration duties get overlooked in pricing and reappear as a deduction in the final draft.
Bring the municipality along
For ground-mounted and heat assets local sentiment decides. A council that feels bypassed costs more time than any bank review.
Questions
What owners ask us
The points owners raise before a mandate — answered the way we would in a first call.
Do you finance pre-consent projects?
Yes, but through equity or mezzanine with milestone drawdowns. Classic project finance realistically starts with binding consent and a grid connection.
Single assets or portfolios only?
Both. Below roughly EUR 10m it usually pays to bundle — process effort per asset is almost the same.
Where do data centres fit?
Between real estate and infrastructure. We cover them under special-purpose assets but run the energy questions in the same review.
Do you work with municipal utilities?
Regularly, on both sides. See our page on municipal and public-sector finance.
Asset classes
What we cover
We advise on real estate and corporate transactions from EUR 20m across Europe, with a clear focus on the DACH region. Every asset class has its own buyer universe – these are the segments we work in most often.
Thinking about selling in this asset class?
Send us the key figures — you get an honest read on price and buyer universe.