RPMI Railpen has provided £20.3m of inflation-linked debt capital to refinance a portfolio of rooftop solar panels across England and Wales.
The deal sees the scheme refinance 1911 assets owned by infrastructure and private equity manager, Foresight.
The Pensions Infrastructure Platform (PIP) facilitated the deal and the loan facility was arranged by Novatio Capital. Eversheds, Everoze and Marsh advised PIP on the transaction.
PIP said the rooftop assets have a total installed capacity of 7.15 MWp and benefit from the UK’s feed in tariff regime. The financing is repayable over 19.5 years.
RPMI Railpen is one of the PIP’s founding investors. Chief executive, Chris Hitchen (pictured), said: “This debt investment will deliver exactly the secure, long-term, inflation-linked cashflows that will help the railways pension schemes achieve our mission to pay members’ pensions securely, affordably and sustainably. As a Founding Investor of PiP we are delighted it has developed the capabilities to effectively source and execute transactions such as this – a key objective of our support for its original establishment.”
PIP said the deal was similar to an investment made by the PIP Multi-Strategy Infrastructure fund earlier this year.
PIP chief executive, Mike Weston, added: “This is a real example of the power of the PIP platform. A UK pension scheme has been able to utilise the platform structure and expertise they helped build at PIP to access a proprietary infrastructure investment opportunity that is a great fit with their scheme specific investment strategy.”
Novatio Capital executive director, Justin May, said: “We are delighted to have worked with PIP again. All parties in this transaction have been able to benefit from the experience gained from working together on a previous transaction we executed this summer.”
