Overview

This milestone debt raise supports ADE, with their mission to accelerate the energy transition by ongoing investment in commercial and industrial solar and battery energy storage projects across the UK. ADE, a UK-based developer of distributed energy assets, is targeting significant portfolio growth - expanding from a current base of 40 operational assets.

Working closely with ADE’s in-house team and their financial advisors at AGP Group, Amberside Advisors provided deep financial modelling expertise that underpinned lender confidence and was engaged to support the process from early-stage modelling through to financial close.

Amberside Advisors’ role

Amberside Advisors provided full-scope financial modelling support, evolving from a technical modelling exercise to a financial advisory role during the course of the engagement. 

Our key contributions included:

• Financial model development: designed and built a debt-raise business plan model tailored to ADE’s capital structure and growth ambitions.

• Business plan integration: incorporated the recent iterations of ADE’s commercial pipeline, capturing both near-term opportunities and long-term expansion to reflect their ambitious growth plans.

• Assumptions review and validation: ensured consistency between model assumptions and commercial and technical reports, to provide comfort to the lending bank.

• Lender engagement and audit support: liaised with Crédit Agricole CIB and supported the independent audit of the financial model, ensuring the bank’s requirements were met and facilitating confidence in the model’s robustness.

• Scenario and sensitivity analysis: delivered stress testing and scenario analysis in line with lender expectations, helping to quantify risk and support bank decision-making.

Our added value

During the project, Amberside Advisors team encountered two primary challenges - both critical to securing lender confidence:

1. Assumption robustness: Amberside Advisors played a central role in refining and validating key commercial assumptions, aligning them with technical realities and lender expectations.

2. Scenario complexity: we worked through a range of evolving scenarios to reflect potential stress cases in market dynamics and project timelines, ensuring the model remained agile and bankable.

Outcome

ADE successfully reached financial close on the debt raise with Crédit Agricole CIB. The transaction enables the rollout of ADE’s distributed energy solutions at scale, contributing to the UK’s net zero ambitions.

"Having established ourselves as a leader in the C&I renewables market, we’re committed to simplifying net zero for business customers and delivering projects that are transforming the energy landscape. We look forward to working with CACIB, harnessing this new funding commitment to help us accelerate our growth strategy and meet demand for onsite renewable energy solutions." John Behan, CEO of Ampyr Distributed Energy, commented on the agreement.

Following financial close, Amberside Advisors is continuing to support ADE, converting the transaction model into an operational tool to monitor performance and support ongoing growth of their asset portfolio.