First published in Cleantech magazine, March/April 2009.

By John O’Brien, Managing Director of Australian CleanTech

Babcock & Brown Wind Partners (BBW) is a pure wind energy business and one of the world’s largest owners of good quality wind energy generation facilities.

BBW's portfolio of assets currently includes wind farms in Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific. The portfolio is diversified by wind resource, currency, equipment, supplier, offtake arrangements and regulatory regime. BBW has grown from a single asset private investment vehicle in June 2003 to a company with 41 wind farms in four countries, three continents and eleven wind regions, and a total capacity as at January 2009 of 2,246MW.  The average capacity factor for all of these wind farms is a very healthy 35%, with the best performing asset recording 47%.

First published in Cleantech magazine, July 2008. Copyright Cleantech Investor Ltd. 2008

Wind energy growth continues apace. Recently published statistics from VB Research indicate that takeover valuations in the wind generation industry are still rising – and that cross border merger and acquisition activity is accelerating.

Wind energy is perhaps the most established source of renewable energy. The technology is, accordingly, tried and tested – at least compared to sectors such as wave energy. There are still some new and innovative wind turbine designs which are attracting venture capital funding (see “The Cutting Edge of Wind” by Tim Chapman). However, the manufacture of wind turbines is dominated by large multinational companies such as Vestas, Gamesa, Enercon, General Electric and Suzlon.