IDFC Private Equity is investing Rs 80 crore more in Green Infra Ltd, a renewable energy company which it had incubated and sponsored in 2008. IDFC PE, through its funds, had earlier invested Rs 360 crore in the company, thereby taking the total commitment to Rs 440 crore. The monies will be invested in the company over a period of two months, across various renewable energy projects. IDFC Private Equity is one of India’s largest and most active private equity fund managers, focused on infrastructure and clean technology sector, with more than Rs 1,000 crore invested in this sector till date.
Green Infra currently has 164 MW of operating wind farm assets under management in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat, as well as a strong execution pipeline, according to its management team. The company is seeking to own and operate assets up to 350 MW by the middle of next year and has a pipeline across the five verticals in which it operates, i.e., wind, biomass, small hydro, solar and energy efficiency. The company has also acquired land in strategic locations for future capacity deployment in its wind and solar verticals.
IDFC PE-backed Green Infra is positioned as an institution which is professionally managed and it has just appointed Shiv Nimbargi as its managing director and CEO. Nimbargi joins the company from French power equipment major Alstom, where he had last served as the regional vice-president of global power sales, responsible for Alstom’s product portfolio in South Asia, with nearly $1 billion in sales.
Nimbargi brings 22 years of power sector experience to his new role, out of which the last 15 years had been spent with Alstom where he had worked in multiple roles and across verticals including sourcing, e-business and Six Sigma. He had headed each of these divisions before becoming the managing director for the boiler division in 2006. Nimbargi also served as a director on the board of NASL (a joint venture between NTPC and Alstom) and vice-president (coal mills) where he managed Alstom’s global unit operations in Europe, the USA, Brazil and China. Prior to Alstom, Nimbargi had worked with Babcock and Wilcox.
The energy firm has also brought in Pinaki Bhattacharyya (previously a director with IDFC PE) as its CFO. At IDFC PE, Bhattacharyya helped manage the power generation and renewable energy investment portfolio of $400 million. Earlier, he had worked with Vantage Point Venture Partners/New Energy Capital in the USA, with the focus on renewable energy investments, besides working with the Bank of Scotland and InterGen (formerly a Shell-Bechtel joint venture) where his responsibilities included project finance, strategy, asset management and the sale of a 3,300 MW portfolio in the USA.
Green Infra To Raise Third-Party Money
Green Infra Ltd, which has till now only raised money from IDFC PE, will hit the fundraising ground in the next six months to raise third-party institutional money. While the quantum of monies to be raised is not frozen yet, the company will require up to $150 million to achieve its target of owning and operating 1 GW of renewable energy projects by 2013, the company’s newly appointed CFO told VCCircle.
The company also has plans to be hived off as a separate entity (from IDFC PE) and get listed on Indian bourses. “We will do it as we progress and as the company scales to a size when it is ripe for a good analyst coverage and international shows,” said Raja Parthasarathy, managing director of IDFC PE.
