Raymond Carlsen

The Norwegian renewables company has already raised $300 million of the $700 million, one-year funding it has shouldered to acquire hydro business SN Power from state-owned Norfund.

With power production up 133% year-on-year, revenues and EBITDA also rose significantly.

The Norwegian developer has opened plants in Ukraine and Egypt. Scatec Solar recently announced it managed to triple energy production in the last year.

Scatec Solar moved into the Malaysian Solar market in late-2016. The company sealed financing for 197 MW of capacity with the help of the country’s green bonds, the year after. Malaysia is continuing on its solar trajectory and will hold the third iteration of its tenders for the allocation of an addition 500 MW in generation capacity.

The Ukrainian market has emerged as rather fertile ground for project developers over the last two years, as a newly enacted law has eased uncertainty over the market’s future, with a quota-based auction system set to replace the country’s generous feed-in tariff scheme in 2020.

Scatec Solar has connected the next part of its 400 MW tracking and bifacial PV plant to the grid in Egypt’s Benban complex. The entire project is set to fully come online throughout the second half of the year. Meanwhile, the company has also secured additional funding for a 33 MW solar project in Mali.

Scatec wants to expand in Southeast Asia and Vietnam is poised to become a hot market thanks to a generous feed-in tariff and a government that has set tight carbon emission targets.

Scatec Solar continued to grow in the first quarter of the year, with a global pipeline of 4 GW and more capacity under construction than in operation. The company expanded slightly less than it did in the preceding quarter, but EBITDA and revenue still grew threefold year on year.

Having put key PV projects into commercial operation, the company is capitalizing on their production. Scatec also has twice its current installed capacity under construction and nearly fourfold that amount – more than 4 GW – in the pipeline as 2018 expectations were surpassed.

It is the first of three solar parks of that size the Norwegian IPP has put in commercial operation in Malaysia’s growing market.