Greenman
Electric vehicle charging
It may just be for a small amount, but it’s probably the start of a series of separate financings for essential infrastructure in suburban grocery-anchored retail parks. As part of the installation of its first electric vehicle hypercharger station, the Irish group Greenman OPEN has signed a financing deal with German bank Volksbank Wittenberg.
This first deal, for its hyperchargers at the retail centre Mahlsdorfer Märkte in east Berlin, may only be for €1.2m, but the company plans to rapidly and successively advance the expansion of its renewable e-charging infrastructure and equip the first 66 assets of the OPEN fund by 2027.
Greenman plans to invest about €37 million in the infrastructure, financed by a combination of debt and equity, with the equity coming from Greenman OPEN (75%) and the Greenman Group itself (25%).
Maximilian Bley, CEO of subsidiary Greenman Energy, said this was the first time hyperchargers had been financed to this extent in the industry, but that lenders were waking up to the potential, as renewable e-mobility becomes ever more routine.
“A total of four charging points are planned to go operational at Mahlsdorfer Märkte in the next two weeks. According to our concept, this will be followed by the expansion and connection of one additional location per month. While we plan to scale our business model further, even this conservative estimate allows for the full final electrification of OPEN’s fund portfolio before 2030.”
Greenman anticipates that every fourth car (15 million) on German roads will be an e-vehicle by 2030. Greenman Energy aims to place hypercharger stations in more than just supermarkets and retail parks in Greenman’s OPEN fund to meet the growing demand for charging options during grocery shopping. The plan is to provide around 250 operational charging stations for consumers by 2027.
Simone Lüllwitz, Head of Corporate Customers at Volksbank Wittenberg, said: “We are seeing connecting factors between the system-relevant energy and mobility transition and the more traditional real estate business. Here, we are working with a specialist in investments in both areas, so we’re able to make a sustainable contribution to the realisation of this important infrastructure.”
Greenman’s open-ended fund has more than €1.13bn of German grocery-anchored retail assets. It has publicly set itself the target of being climate neutral with its assets by 2050, and through Greenman Energy, is already actively installing photovoltaic panels on the roofs of its portfolio of properties, supporting their tenants’ own Scope 3 emission targets and lowering their energy costs.
