Scottish firm gets financial push to grow offshore renewables offering

Orkney-based Green Marine has secured financing from Siemens Financial Services (SFS) with the aim of growing its offshore renewables offering.

Green Marine stated that it was seeing a rapid growth opportunity driven by a massive increase in global interest in green energy sources and many businesses wanting to reduce their carbon footprint across the supply chain by working with local companies.

“We’ve got a long history of working in the marine sector. Before specialising in offshore wind and tidal energy we ran a fleet of fishing vessels around the world,” said Jason Schofield, Managing Director at Green Marine. “But with the changing tides we saw a chance to support greener business and have dedicated our efforts to sharing skills and expertise in offshore renewables.”

SFS tailored a seven-year agreement to refinance the balloon payment owed to another lender and additional funding to enable an equity restructure so Green Marine could focus on future growth.

“There’s a real need in the sector right now for vessels and expert engineers to support all the emerging offshore wind, wave and tidal energy projects, so it’s important for our industry that equally knowledgeable funders like SFS are ready to step in and facilitate investment,” Schofield stated.

The loan was secured against the 2015-Damen-built workboat MV Green Isle and a 2011-Damen-built crew transfer vessel (CTV) MV Green Storm.

According to Green Marine, the solution helped to free up cash flow, enabling the company to re-invest in other areas of the business.

“Supporting sustainable, experienced operations like Green Marine is an absolute pleasure for us. We are totally aligned in our aims to make the industry greener and cleaner, and we look forward to continuing to foster the business’ already impressive growth,” Andrew Southwood from SFS said.

“We know most small marine business don’t have enough capital to fulfill their ambitions. Our new marine finance business builds on Siemens rich history in the marine market to provide marine business with the financial tools they need to be successful.”