USD 375 Million Deal to Power the Middle East's Clean Energy Growth

**Tim Elliott** (0:00)
It's the Morning Drive. This is Mira Business FM. A major financing deal is giving a fresh boost to the Middle East's clean energy transition. Positive Zero has secured up to $375 million US dollars in long-term funding to expand distributed solar, energy efficiency and clean mobility projects across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Amman, Qatar, almost the whole GCC.
And it's the region's first non-recourse financing for a diversified portfolio of decentralized sustainable infrastructure. It's a mouthful and we'll explain exactly what that means as well. The question, so why is this financing such a milestone for the region? How does it set a new blueprint for sustainable infrastructure? And what does it mean for businesses and investors? Questions for David Auriau, who is the CEO of Positive Zero and is with me. It's good to have you here, David.

**David Auriau** (1:02)
Good morning.

**Tim Elliott** (1:02)
Good morning. Thanks for joining us. You've just secured, as I said, $375 million up to that amount in non-recourse financing. I'll come to non-recourse financing in a moment, but potentially, this is game-changing. So congratulations for the benefit of the non-banker listening. Why is non-recourse such a breakthrough here, and what makes this so significant a milestone, not just for you guys, but also for the region?

**David Auriau** (1:33)
Let me maybe address the second question first.
So this financing is significant for several reasons. First, of course, for us, for Positive Zero, it provides us with $375 million US of long-term capital to grow the company and to be used for the coming years without having to raise financing project by project.

**Tim Elliott** (2:01)
Sure.

**David Auriau** (2:02)
It gives us, of course, the flexibility to deploy capital across several geographies and across several solutions. So I think this is, for us, what makes it truly unique. For the region, of course, it also demonstrates that decentralized energy infrastructure has become a mature and bankable asset class. Traditionally, we've seen the investors focused on utility scale projects. Today, I think for the first time, they see also value in distributed solar, energy efficiency and clean mobility infrastructure that is located directly at the premises of our customers.
So we believe that these transactions have created a new financing model that we believe others in the industry will follow.

**Tim Elliott** (3:00)
Okay, I mean, it marks, I think, a maturity point in how you assess the risk of decentralized energy projects, for sure. We're used to seeing billions poured into massive utility scale solar plants, but your focus is decentralized, distributed solar and energy efficiency. Why is this smaller scale approach more critical for the regional energy transition than just building one, you could just build a big giant farm in the desert, couldn't you?

**David Auriau** (3:34)
Yeah, it's more critical because it's also more complex. So first, I think the investors have addressed, you know, like the low hanging fruits. So the low hanging fruits is like large scale, large deployments, plain vanilla project financing. So what we do is portfolio financing. So we are financing a number of small infrastructures that on their own are probably not so attractive, you know, like for any investors.
So here, the complexities in the ability to basically create sizable portfolio that enable actually all of this financial engineering to happen. And if it happens, then it enable, you know, like to make those solutions more attractive and that they are more attractive, we can accelerate the adoptions of those solutions across the market. Today, of course, you know, like, a lot of people, commercial, industrial clients, they want to embrace the sustainability. They want, you know, like, to save cost. They want to be cleaner. But there's a lot of barriers, you know, like, for them, you know, like, to overcome.
So the large scales doesn't give them anything. You know, the large scales, you know, like, is utility companies producing cheaper and cleaner electricity at the grid level. Okay, but their benefit, you know, like, is none in the sense that the tariff of the electricity that they buy from the utility company is still the same. There is no impact on their P&L and no impact on their business competitiveness. So here, you know, like, distributed infrastructure enabled them to take control, as we say in a company, take charge, you know, like, of their own energy consumption and as such, you know, like, to save energy, to save cost, and of course, to become more sustainable. So I think this would be, so this is a new asset class. This is something that's enabled each and every company to take control of the way they consume electricity, the way they even, you know, like, use their energy assets themselves.