What we do

We get deals done!

Green Giraffe Advisory is the pioneering advisory arm of the Green Giraffe Group, dedicated to pushing the next frontier in finance. We are the premier financial advisor for energy transition projects and investors. We offer bespoke financial advice, market intelligence and development services in all renewable and energy transition technologies 

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Countries

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310+ GW

Renewable capacity

Who we are

Green Giraffe Advisory draws its strength from its international team

Green Giraffe Advisory is an independent financial advisory company, focused on helping clients shape the energy transition. Based in offices on 5 continents, Green Giraffe Advisory is built on the expertise of 110+ professionals with project & corporate finance, M&A, tendering, contracting and legal backgrounds

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Other Bioenergy Storage & grid Solar Floating Onshore Offshore e-Mobility Hydrogen& e-fuels

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Chinese turbines cannot succeed in the European offshore wind market because they are not bankable. Myth or reality?

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Chinese turbines cannot succeed in the European offshore wind market because they are not bankable. Myth or reality?

This month, Mingyang announced a deal with the Italian government to build a factory in Italy supplying their 19MW turbines to the wind farms developed by Italian developer Renexia. It is the latest of a series of announcements that involve the Chinese turbine manufacturer. They already supplied the first ever Chinese offshore turbines in Europe for a project developed by the same Renexia off Taranto and have now signed a preferred supply agreement with Luxcara, who has just won a 1.5 GW site in Germany this week.   While Chinese dominance in solar, battery and so many other sectors has been widely accepted, each piece of news about Chinese turbine suppliers knocking at the European door is followed by heated debates. Is the competition fair or is China subsidising its industry, as suggested in a recent investigation of the EU commission that raises fears of a new trade war? Should the European policy makers go one step further and copy the US in their protectionism? Can public auctions define rules that prevent Chinese turbines to be competitive? In the urgency that climate change commands, is the question of where the turbines come from of any relevance at all? While the cost of living is fuelling the surge of the extreme right everywhere in Europe, is it sensible to fight the cheapest option?

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Is the UK Offshore Wind Industry Spinning Back into Gear through the CfD results?  

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Is the UK Offshore Wind Industry Spinning Back into Gear through the CfD results?  

Yesterday the UK government announced the results of Allocation Round 6 (AR6) of contract for difference (CfD). The UK’s CfD scheme has long been touted as the mechanism of choice for incentivising investment in renewable energy projects – with the capital intensity of offshore wind (OW), this support mechanism is especially critical.

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The price is right – how much is your renewable energy project really worth?

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The price is right – how much is your renewable energy project really worth?

As said by Warren Buffett, price is what you pay, value is what you get. You want the two to be roughly the same. The world’s renewable energy capacity grew at a record pace in 2023. For the first time ever, in 2022, investments in clean energy overtook investments in fossil fuels and they continue to outpace the latter. This has triggered an explosion of activity in buying and selling projects. More than ever, buyers and sellers are confronted by the question: at what price?   This blog aims to lay out the fundamentals of valuing renewable energy projects. For accessibility, we have tried to avoid using complex financial lingo or digging too far into the details. As financial advisors who work on many sell-side and buy-side energy transition transactions, one of our key tasks is valuing the projects, portfolios or platforms in question.

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The future of financing renewables in South Africa

Since opening its office in Cape Town in 2017, Green Giraffe has been involved in three renewables government tenders in South Africa, with the most recent milestone being the financial close of the REIPPP Bid Window Round 5 projects of Coleskop WEF, Phezukomoya WEF and San Kraal WEF – the first three projects from Bid Window 5 to reach financial close. The South Africa market is now looking beyond government tenders towards utility-scale projects in the C&I space. What the REIPPP program has provided is a blueprint for financing utility-scale projects in South Africa for various offtake structures, and lenders & investors are allocating large amounts of capital to fund them – bringing much needed energy online.

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New York Bight lease auction – a bittersweet outcome

Wow! USD 4.37 billion bid for the New York Bight. Who saw that coming? Ever since the last BOEM offshore wind lease auction in 2018 those of us watching this space have traded opinions on the bids we would see in the Bight. It became the standard exchange over beers at every offshore wind conference since. “Will we see USD 300 million bid?”, “USD 500 million would be crazy, but we might see it”. Well, the high bid turned out to be USD 1.1 billion! We saw five bidders each commit more than USD 500 million for lease blocks. So what do we make of all this? Firstly, this is hugely positive news for the US offshore wind industry. We may once and for all stop talking about whether the industry is really going to take off. Oh, it’s off alright. The winning bidders include the who’s who of pedigreed offshore wind sponsors – including EDF, Shell, CIP, EDPR, Engie, RWE and Total. These are veterans of offshore wind who clearly see the US market as a sound investment. We also saw several newcomers bring sizeable checkbooks and mount competitive bids. This is good to see. Hopefully we will see the same depth and diversity of bidders in the upcoming auctions for North Carolina and California later this year. As we watched the live bidding unfold over three days, we couldn’t help but wonder as the bidding moved into the afternoon of the second day and bids roared past USD 500 million, if this wasn’t just crazy. Had these guys all lost their minds? By the end of the second day we still had twelve active bidders with the top lease block bid sitting at USD 900 million. No, it actually was not crazy. These were rational, sophisticated companies acting according to plan. Many of them had been strategizing, refining competitor analyses and running mock “Bight auctions” for months. The winners had carefully prepared. They were also well aware of the last auction results – not the 2018 Massachusetts auction, the 2021 UK Round 4 auction. The winning bids on a price per MW basis are generally higher than the winning bids for UK Round 4, but not wildly so. The market dynamics in the US logically drove higher bids. This brings us to the downside of these auction results. At the end of the day, the US federal treasury picked up USD 4.37 billion. Where does that come from? The very rational and sophisticated bidders of course. And why would a rational and sophisticated bidder agree to make those payments? Because they reasonably expect to make it all back selling the electricity from those wind farms. So, ultimately it will be the rate payers whose utilities buy that power who will pay the USD 4.37 billion (plus a reasonable return of course). Hmm. The New York Bight auction was a tremendous success and validation of the US offshore wind industry. Does the federal government need to make billions of dollars from these leases? No. Should rate payers pay billions of dollars more in their electricity bills to help sponsors recover the cost of these leases? No. Are billion dollar leases ultimately a good thing to support further growth of the US offshore wind industry? No. There are several approaches to protect rate payers while allowing bidders to continue behaving rationally. Massachusetts offers one example. In each future offtake RfP, the state requires bidders to bid less than the price paid in the prior RfP. This simple approach captures – for the benefit of the state’s ratepayers – what should be the natural cost decline as the offshore wind industry matures. The result will be to force future lease auction bidders to factor this dynamic into their bid models rather than assume the offtake market will bear whatever is needed to recover their lease bid cost. Onward to North Carolina!

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