Category: Daily Brief

Gulf capital is building Africa’s battery backbone. Egypt just fast-tracked the region’s biggest storage bet — while Iberia keeps tightening its grid.

What we’re tracking today:

Egypt’s Cabinet granted “golden licences” to two battery storage projects developed by Dubai-based AMEA Power — 1.5 GWh combined, backed by USD 800m of investment. Fast-track licensing for storage in Africa’s largest markets is exactly how the UAE–Africa capital corridor scales.

Portugal and Spain have commissioned a new 400 kV interconnector in the north of the Peninsula, lifting cross-border exchange capacity by around 1,000 MW, per grid operator REN. Deeper market coupling means better price formation and stronger revenue cases for solar, wind and BESS on both sides of the border.

Renewables met 71% of Portugal’s electricity consumption in H1 2026 and covered 77% of the country’s demand growth, REN reports. At this penetration, value migrates to firming, storage and grid access — where disciplined capital positions.

From Cairo to Lisbon, storage and grid are where returns concentrate. At Persimmon Investments, that’s the map we invest against.

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Storage is no longer the side deal — it’s the main event.

A quiet weekend on Iberian and Gulf deal wires, so today we follow where flexibility capital actually moved — and it moved at scale.

What we’re tracking today:

Saudi Arabia’s SPPC named EDF, TotalEnergies, ACWA Power, Tesla, Gotion and Envision among qualified bidders for its second build-own-operate BESS tender — 3 GW / 12 GWh across six projects. Gulf storage procurement is now running at a scale Europe should study.

In the UK, ContourGlobal acquired a 2 GWh Scottish BESS while Zenobē and Revera took FID on two more — 3.6 GWh committed in a single week. Operating storage portfolios are consolidating fast, and buyers are paying up for ready-to-build.

Brussels signed a first-of-its-kind tripartite pact in late June: 22 member states pledging 30–35 GW of new storage by 2028, with EIB backing — a demand signal that reprices BESS pipelines across the EU, Iberia included.

From Riyadh’s tenders to Brussels’ pledges, flexibility is where the capital stack is forming. At Persimmon Investments, that’s the map we invest against.

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Storage is where capital is clearing — from Riyadh to the Rhine.
A quiet summer weekend still left three clean signals for renewables investors.

What we’re tracking today:
Saudi Arabia’s SPPC pre-qualified 27 bidders this week for its second battery tender — 3 GW / 12 GWh across six 500 MW sites. ACWA Power, Masdar, EDF and TotalEnergies all made the list. Gulf storage procurement is now gigascale, and competition this deep compresses costs for every BESS business case in the region.
Acciona Energía closed the sale of a 64 MW Spanish mini-hydro portfolio to White Summit Capital for €66m. Infrastructure capital keeps paying for operating, dispatchable Iberian assets while merchant solar reprices — asset rotation is funding the next build cycle.
Germany’s Green Flexibility acquired a 750 MW / 3 GWh BESS project portfolio from developer Kajoni. European storage consolidation is accelerating; well-sited, grid-secured pipelines are becoming the scarcest asset in the market.

At Persimmon Investments, dispatchability is the thread we follow — and this week, capital followed it too.

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Iberia just raised its grid ceiling — and global capital keeps chasing firm green power

One day, three signals on where deal economics are heading.
What we’re tracking today:
Portugal and Spain inaugurated the new 400 kV Minho–Galicia interconnection at Arbo — a ~€128m build by REN and Red Eléctrica lifting sustained commercial exchange capacity to 3,000 MW in both directions. Deeper Iberian coupling means lower curtailment risk and stronger capture prices for solar, wind and storage assets.
SK Inc and KKR launched a US$1.29bn renewables platform in South Korea — 1.7 GW operating today, scaling towards 10 GW — with KKR taking control to serve AI data-centre load. Big capital is consolidating operating fleets around firm demand.
Tesla deployed 13.5 GWh of energy storage in Q2 2026, up 40% year-on-year and its second-best quarter ever. Global BESS demand keeps compounding — and keeps underwriting the value of storage-attached projects.

At Persimmon Investments, stronger grids and firmer demand are exactly the map we invest against.

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In Iberia, renewable value is migrating from the panel to the battery.
A record solar build has flipped the economics: generation is abundant, flexibility is scarce — and that gap is where returns now sit.

What we’re tracking today:
Spain logged 397 hours of negative power prices in Q1 2026 — roughly eight times the 48 hours a year earlier, with Portugal at 222. Merchant solar cannibalises its own revenue as capacity floods the grid; uncontracted assets get repriced, and storage moves to the centre of the thesis.
Portugal is building the fix: a new capacity market with a dedicated auction to scale battery storage from 13 MW toward 750 MW, inside a €400m grid package. It puts a revenue floor under flexibility — exactly the signal that makes storage and hybrids bankable.
Capital is still backing the build-out. Actis reached a $2.5bn first close on its $6bn Energy 6 fund, targeting renewables, grids and storage across the Middle East, Africa and beyond — the markets we operate in.

A quiet day for headline deals in our core markets — so we’re reading the structure. At Persimmon Investments, structure is what we underwrite.

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Merchant solar is repricing in Iberia — and capital isn’t leaving, it’s getting choosier.

A quiet 24 hours for fresh core-market transactions, so the signal worth reading is structural: where money rotates when merchant power turns volatile.

What we’re tracking today:
Spain’s solar boom has become an investor story. Ready-to-build projects that fetched €150,000/MW a few years ago now clear at €30,000–90,000/MW, with negative-price hours already tripling to 381 this year. Merchant-only exposure is being repriced hard — contracted offtake and storage are the new moat.
African distributed solar keeps pulling structured capital. d.light closed a $50M green bond and the IFC committed $10M to CrossBoundary Access for minigrids and batteries across Nigeria and Madagascar. Smaller tickets, but exactly the de-risked, demand-backed model that scales.
In the UK, Ofgem shortlisted 16 long-duration storage projects — 7.6 GW — under a new cap-and-floor scheme. A revenue floor is what makes merchant storage bankable, and markets facing Iberia’s oversupply are watching closely.

At Persimmon Investments, we invest against that map: contracted cash flows, storage, and markets that pay for flexibility.

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Big capital is getting bigger — and it’s still backing renewables.

Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is reportedly raising €16bn (~$18.2bn) for its next renewables flagship — €4bn larger than the last fund. When the deepest pools of institutional money scale up their solar, wind and storage mandates, the bid for de-risked assets tightens across every market we watch.

What we’re tracking today:
Iberia: Portugal and Spain set daily solar generation records on Friday (~30 GWh and ~235 GWh) — and were the only European markets to dodge negative power prices last week. The midday capture-price squeeze is real, and storage is the answer.
West Africa: the African Development Bank became the first institutional shareholder in the ECOWAS Bank (EBID), with $30M equity plus a $70M line earmarked for renewables.
Distributed energy: IFC invested $10M in CrossBoundary Access for minigrids and batteries in Nigeria and Madagascar; D.light crossed $1bn in cumulative securitized solar financing.

The pattern holds: more capital, deeper storage, and value migrating toward grids that need flexibility. At Persimmon Investments, that’s the map we invest against.

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