(Bloomberg) -- A former Banco Santander SA banker created an artificial intelligence-based tool to help investors find renewable energy projects to either finance or buy.
Alter5, a digital platform co-founded by Miguel Solana after almost 10 years working in corporate banking at the largest lender by market value in the European Union, is taking advantage of AI to “simplify investment opportunities in a mid-market which has historically been opaque and limited,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.
Spain has emerged as a global clean energy powerhouse due to a mix of vast land availability and favorable conditions to develop both wind and solar plants. While banks are focusing on financing large projects, there are many smaller ones that need an “investment infrastructure” to receive funding or lay the groundwork for their potential acquisition, Solana said.
Alter5 specializes in projects with debt of no more than €80 million ($84 million), as well as in deals in which the target has capacity of between 30 megawatts and 140 megawatts. It operates mainly in Spain, but also in markets such as Italy.
Using a proprietary platform based on tidied-up public information and AI tools such as ChatGPT, Alter5 can now detect projects in a specific area, assess them and then match them with potential investors, or the other way round. AI helps make the tool’s operation “more standardized” and effective, he said.
Alter5 has so far closed funding deals worth €120 million in total as well as merger and acquisition transactions involving about 700 megawatts of capacity, focusing on small projects whose financing may be challenging for the traditional funding model that’s mainly targeting a few large deals, Solana said.
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