On May 5, Equinor and Wento completed an agreement in which the former will acquire all the shares of the latter from private equity firm Enterprise Investors. Equinor is a multinational energy company with the Norwegian government as its largest stakeholder. Wento is a Polish developer of solar, wind, and energy storage projects. The deal is valued at EUR 91 million before net cash adjustments, though Enterprise Investors said that the transaction could reach the scale of EUR 100 million. According to the reports from other media outlets, Enterprise Investors said that the gross proceeds on the investment is EUR 139 million.
Regarding Wento’s solar business, it has 177MW of generation capacity that it sells to the Polish government under a contract-of-difference scheme. Currently, the solar projects in Wento’s pipeline have a total generation capacity of 1.6GW. They vary in the stage of development but are all expected to be ready to build by the end of 2025. Equinor also said that Wento as a new subsidiary will be working on more than 1GW of solar projects.
Headquartered in Poland, Enterprise Investors was established with the support of the Polish American Enterprise Fund that was created by the US government in the early 1990s to encourage formation of private enterprises in Poland. The private equity firm currently has an office in New York and manages one of the largest portfolios of private equity funds in Central Eastern Europe.
As for Equinor, it has mainly been an operator of offshore oil and gas platforms but is now actively expanding into the solar and wind sectors. Still, fossil fuels will likely remain a core business of the company for a long time. Equinor acquired a 10% stake in Scatec Solar in 2018, and the ownership was then increased to 15.2% in 2019. Together, Equinor and Scatec are developing solar projects in Brazil. Their projects that are either in operation or under construction in Brazil have a total capacity of around 1.5GW. Also, off the northern coast of Poland, Equinor and Polenergia are jointly building three offshore wind farms: MFW Bałtyk I, II, and III. Their total generation capacity comes to 1.44GW.
