Stockbroker Brewin Dolphin has come up with a venture capital trust unlike any other. The Ventus VCT wants to raise £25 million purely to invest in a spread of ‘small on-shore UK wind farm projects’.

Stockbroker Brewin Dolphin has come up with a venture capital trust unlike any other. The Ventus VCT wants to raise £25 million purely to invest in a spread of ‘small on-shore UK wind farm projects’.

These will be structured as independent stand-alone operating ventures to get around the VCT rules, which dictate that only £1 million can be put into one investment in any one year. The trust has an agreement for its potential portfolio companies to supply power at an agreed price until 2016 to a major UK electricity supply company so that it can meet its statutory requirement to source energy from alternative methods.

This should reduce risks, provided the farms are built on time and within budget. Brewin Dolphin’s Lenny Norstrand says each farm will cost £1 million. The manager, Climate Change Capital, is responsible for a quarter of the wind farms currently built in the UK.

The farms should produce enough energy at full capacity to meet the annual needs of 40,000 homes. One director is Alan Moore, chairman of the British Wind Energy Association and co-chairman of the Government’s Renewables Advisory Board.

Separately, Neptune Investment Management plans to launch a £25 million VCT in January in association with McDonald Glencross, which has so far launched five EIS funds. The trust will be called Neptune Calculus. A quarter of the initial funds will be put in Neptune’s High Income fund and the remainder will back up to 30 VCT-qualifying companies.

1/12/04