Iona Capital, the environmentally focussed investor, has today announced the successful completion of an investment into JFS Home Farm Biogas Ltd and JFS Westhome Farm Biogas Ltd, both joint venture companies with developer JFS & Associates Limited. Iona has already financed two farm scale AD plants with JFS last year and is providing further funding for the development of JFS’ pipeline of AD projects.
Working closely with UTS Biogas and Surgo, JFS will act as a development partner and construct a new 200kW AD plant at Home Farm, Newby Wiske, Northallerton, North Yorks and another 500kW AD plant at Westholme Farm, Dalton, Thirsk, North Yorkshire. Both facilities will become operational in the autumn of 2014.The farms will provide the required feedstock (manure, slurry, maize) to the AD plant to enable generation and sale of renewable electricity to the National Grid thus benefiting from Feed in Tariff Scheme.
Mike Dunn, Director, Iona Capital said: “In the 2 years since founding Iona, we have financed 7 AD plants with 3 of those already operational and the others becoming fully operational in 2014. We have a growing pipeline of potential projects and look forward to deploying further funds into the biogas sector throughout 2014. Iona has established close working relationships with project developers such as JFS which has enabled both the timely and efficient deployment of capital. As an institutional fund manager, we see great potential for the development of the AD market in the UK -there are only 109 plants in the UK compared with 7,000 in Germany.”
Matthew Flint, Director JFS & Associates said: “We have closed 4 projects now in collaboration with Iona and are pleased to see our pipeline coming online. We believe our business model of delivering self-sufficient AD plants to the agricultural sector and stimulating the rural economy is attractive for both institutional investors and farmers. Iona Capital have demonstrated their continued support of both JFS and the farm scale Biogas sector, thus making them a valuable partner.”
