Guy Hands in £1.2bn Infinis wind power bid

Sunday Times
October 26, 2008
Danny Fortson

GUY HANDS, the buyout baron behind beleaguered music publisher EMI, has set his sights on a new sector: wind energy.
Infinis, the waste-to-energy company owned by his buyout firm Terra Firma, has set in motion a £1.2 billion plan to build it into one of the largest wind-energy producers in the country. Its aim is to buy or build up to 800MW of onshore wind-generating capacity over 10 years.
Alan Lovell, chief executive of Infinis, hired a team led by Alan Baker, former chief executive of Airtricity’s Scottish business, to lead the initiative. “The challenge when I took over was to use the strong cash flow from the landfill gas business to build a more general renewables business,” said Lovell. “Our first move is onshore wind.”
In the UK it costs between £1.4m and £1.6 m per megawatt to build onshore wind farms. This would bring the total cost of the plan for 800MW to about £1.2 billion.

Infinis has just received its first approval for a 27MW wind farm on one its landfill sites in Scotland.
Other projects are faltering. Warwick Energy, developer of the £800m Thanet wind farm, halted construction this month after Iberdrola Renovables, the Spanish renewables giant, pulled out of a deal to buy the farm from Christofferson Robb, its hedge-fund owner.