ERBD nod of confidence towards PPC; 75-mln€ stake in latter’s 1.35-bln€ share capital increase

The European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (ERBD) on Monday announced a 75-million-euro investment in Public Power Corp. (PPC), the ATHEX-listed utility that ranks as Greece’s dominant electricity provider and producer.

The European development bank said it has joined a 1.35-billion-euro share capital increase announced by PPC.

The one-time state power monopoly in Greece, which came close to insolvency in 2018 and 2019 under the burden of nearly one billion euros in accumulated losses, said it will use the capital drained from the share capital increase to fund investments in renewable energy sources (RES) domestically and in the wider SE Europe region.

Under a new management since the summer of 2019, appointed in the wake of center-right New Democracy (ND) party’s election landslide, PPC’s management said the strategic goal is to transform the company into an environmentally viable, modern and fully digitized utility, and using the ESG index as a guide and yardstick.

Overall, the utility wants to attract six billion euros over the 2022-2024 period, of which 3.2 billion will be funneled towards RES’s, along with one billion euros for a wider power distribution system. Another oft-cited target is the elimination of lignite mining and use in Greece this decade – the later being a strategic goal by the Mitsotakis government.

In terms of numbers, PPC “blueprint” calls for power generated from RES’s to increase from 3.4 GW this year to 8.4 GW in 2026.