Verdant Energy and Aura Power Developments Limited have merged under the Aura Power brand, with CVC DIF's infrastructure equity fund retaining ownership of the combined entity and Eiffel Investment Group providing financing to support the transaction and refinance existing junior facilities; the transaction consideration is not disclosed.

Aura Power was founded in 2013 by Simon Coulson, who retains a minority stake and leads the combined company. It has advanced more than 2.1GW of solar and BESS projects to ready-to-build or commercialised stages in the UK and internationally.

Verdant Energy was launched in 2022, wholly owned by CVC DIF through its DIF Infrastructure VII fund, and has assembled approximately 660MW of operating and under-construction utility-scale solar and co-located BESS assets. The combined platform comprises approximately 1GW of operating and under-construction assets and a 10GW development pipeline.

CVC DIF is the infrastructure equity division of CVC, a Luxembourg-headquartered global private markets manager with approximately €200 billion in AUM. The combined entity employs more than 75 people.

Advisors: Akereos Capital, CMS, TLT, DNV and PwC (CVC DIF); Burges Salmon (Aura Power); Norton Rose Fulbright (ib vogt).

The structural driver is scale threshold economics in UK solar and BESS development. Project finance, grid connection queue management and EPC procurement leverage all improve materially above approximately 1GW, the threshold the merger creates. CVC DIF's investment rationale is explicit: Verdant's delivery track record combined with Aura Power's contracted pipeline and 10GW development pipeline creates a platform with the critical mass to operate as an institutional-grade IPP rather than a developer reliant on asset sales.

Coulson's minority stake and continued CEO role aligns the development capability that built the 10GW pipeline with the capital that can now fund it, avoiding the knowledge loss that often follows developer acquisitions by infrastructure funds.

For Ireland, the Aura Power-Verdant merger is a template for the consolidation that will eventually be necessary. EirGrid's connections pipeline is similarly constrained, Irish renewable developers face identical scale threshold economics, and no domestic player yet operates at the GW-scale platform threshold that unlocks institutional financing on comparable terms.

Source: solarpowerportal.co.uk / cvc.com / bebeez.eu / finance.yahoo.com / tlt.com