Feb. 15 (Bloomberg) — Mighty River Power Ltd., a state-
owned power utility in New Zealand, agreed to terminate a five-
year-old geothermal energy investment venture with closely held
GeoGlobal Energy LLC.
The companies are breaking up their GGE Fund, which is
managed by GeoGlobal and financed primarily by Mighty River, the
Auckland-based utility said yesterday in a statement. It will
pay GeoGlobal, based in Chevy Chase, Maryland, $24.8 million
when the deal is completed.
Mighty River will take control of the fund’s minority
interest in U.S. geothermal developer EnergySource LLC as well
as a Chilean business unit and development-stage projects in
that country. GeoGlobal will retain the fund’s assets in Germany
and those in the U.S. not owned by EnergySource, according to
the statement.
“We see a lot of potential synergies between our business
and EnergySource as an operator and developer of a large
brownfield geothermal reservoir in the U.S.,” Mighty River
Chief Executive Officer Doug Heffernan said in the statement.
Closely-held EnergySource, which is owned by investment
company Hannon Armstrong Capital LLC and renewable energy
developer Catalyst Renewables Corp., said in 2010 that GeoGlobal
bought a 20 percent stake in the company. It has completed one
U.S. project, in the Salton Sea area of southern California.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Andrew Herndon in San Francisco at
aherndon2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Reed Landberg at
landberg@bloomberg.net
