Alterra receives bid for Icelandic power asset
Interest in clean energy company could be sold
More than a year after a highprofile feud with pop star Bjork over whether foreigners should own natural resources in Iceland, Canadian clean energy firm Alterra Power Corp. says it may sell its showpiece asset on the island nation.
Vancouver-based Alterra said Friday it has received an unsolicited offer for its controlling interest in Icelandic geothermal power company HS Orka. It did not disclose the identity of the bidder, saying only that it is a group of private investors backed by an Icelandic bank.
Local media said the bid- ding group is being steered by Alexander Gudmundsson, an energy consultant and banker who was chairman of HS Orka until September 2010.
Alterra is the renewable energy company started by famed mining entrepreneur Ross Beaty, who founded Pan American Silver Corp.
It changed its name to Alterra from Magma Energy last year after buying fellow Canadian clean energy firm Plutonic Power Corp. for $190-million.
Alterra said it has signed a non-binding term sheet to pursue the sale of Orka, conditional on reaching a definitive agreement and obtaining necessary regulatory approvals.
It owns 66.6% of the energy producer with the remainder owned by a syndicate of Icelandic pension funds.
“It’s our obligation to our shareholders to consider any offer that seems serious,” Anders Kruus, Alterra’s vice- president of corporate relations, said in an interview Friday. “That’s our job.”
Iceland has enormously lucrative clean energy assets and some of the cheapest energy production on the planet, Mr. Kruus said.
Alterra will continue to explore opportunities to build in Iceland even if it sells HS Orka.
Alterra operates six power plants totalling 567 megawatts of capacity, including two geothermal facilities in Iceland and B.C.’s largest wind farm.
Its Icelandic assets include licenses for two high-temper- ature geothermal fields.
In April 2011, Alterra said it would sell a portion of its stake in HS Orka to the pension funds following a public controversy over its control of the company. The protest was fuelled by the involvement of Icelandic singer Bjork, who said the island’s natural resources should not be owned by foreigners.
“[Iceland’s] geothermal plants have been public property for a century,” Bjork told the Financial Post in an interview last year. “The majority of its habitants feel it should stay that way.”
Bjork is not involved in the HS Orka bid, her spokesman said by email Friday.
Speaking with the Post this year, Mr. Beaty called the feud “just goofy.” He said: “It’s been a couple of off years [for Alterra] since we started it. It’s just more difficult building a clean energy company than it is building a mining exploration company.”
Separately Friday, Alterra said it had received its first equity distribution from the Dokie wind farm. Its shares rose 16% to $0.43 in afternoon trading Friday on the Toronto Stock Exchange.