Blackstone Seeks Buyer for German Offshore Wind Farm
Alternative asset manager Blackstone Group LP is seeking a buyer for its Meerwind Sued/Ost offshore wind park in Germany, hoping to benefit from a surge in deal activity in the sector, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The 288 megawatt (MW) Meerwind Sued/Ost wind park, located 23 kilometres north of the German island of Heligoland, was completed last year and provides electricity for up to 360,000 households.
The park could fetch more than 1.4 billion euros ($1.5 billion), based on per-MW multiples of recent deals that included EnBW's sale of a stake in offshore wind park Baltic 2 to Australia's Macquarie.
Meerwind Sued/Ost is owned by WindMW, in which Blackstone owns an 80 percent stake, with the remaining stake held by German wind project developer Windland Energieerzeugungs GmbH.
It is yet unclear whether Windland also wants to sell its stake.
Blackstone and Windland declined to comment while WindMW was not immediately available for comment.
Offshore wind parks, which stand to receive guaranteed tariffs for feeding electricity into the grid over a period of several years, have become a favourite with investors looking for stable returns amid ultra-low interest rates.
(Reporting by Alexander Huebner, Christoph Steitz and Arno Schuetze)
