Energy and renewables

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So I’m Richard Harris, I’m a

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director in the energy team at PKF Francis Clark. I’ve worked

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in the energy sector since 2011, and joined PKF in 2017 along with Andy.

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Since that point, the team has really grown.

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So and now a very established team of nine people dedicated to the UK market.

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I’m Andy Thornhill, I’m also director in the team and joined at the same time

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as Richard into PKF. I’ve been in corporate finance for about 15 years

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and started in a dedicated financial modelling team at Deloitte.

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Before that, I worked in real estate finance

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and I was in audit a long time ago.

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2025 has been a fantastic year

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for the energy sector, but also the team. Within Francis Clark,

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we’ve got specialists in corporate finance,

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due diligence, audit, tax and all of those areas of

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the business have had real successes, which has been great to see.

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Within the M&A team,

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there’s been real growth

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in terms of people joining the team, both from internal recruitment and externally,

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but also growth of people within the team with a number of promotions.

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And that growth of the team has really enabled us to improve the work

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that we’re doing for our clients,

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improve the type of clients we’re working for, elevate the level of the projects

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and the scale of transactions

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we’re working on, to a point where we’ve done

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some of the biggest transactions in the UK market this year.

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We joined PKF because

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we wanted to focus more on the developers that we were working with,

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and to be able to go on a longer journey with them and grow with them,

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and that’s really come to bear.

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A lot of our clients have been in the industry for a very long time,

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as we have, and we have seen what works in a transaction,

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who the buyers are, where the value drivers are, where the risks are

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and what we’re most focused on is making sure

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that we get

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the really quality results for our clients, and that’s come through

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in the number of transactions we’ve managed to successfully conclude

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in the last year.

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We’ve done some great transactions in solar in the last 12 months.

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The standout deal was a transaction for a developer called Low Carbon.

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Within that transaction, there was the largest onshore renewables

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project to be sold in the UK ever.

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Alongside that, we also ran a process to sell their TCPA projects,

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which culminated in a

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sale of eight projects, over 300MW of capacity there, that concluded

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in May and June of this year.

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We’ve been in the sector for over a decade, operating

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as a senior team, and have built really strong relationships

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across developers and investors, and we find that they come back to us

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multiple times, and that continued engagement with them

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really helps to cement that relationship and our understanding of their needs.

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We also find that people come back to us

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with projects when they reach that point in their lifecycle to sell a project.

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So what we love about our job

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is that we get to work with developers and see real value be achieved by them,

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and I think we add a lot of value at that stage.

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I find that I really value the relationships we’ve built over time

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and to see how much goes into developing these projects.

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By staying with those developers and seeing the new projects come through,

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we spend a lot of time and we really get underneath

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and understand

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what’s driving them, but also what’s driving the value of the projects.

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So we’ve raised early funding for projects that are pre-planning

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whole way through to FID and then working on operational projects,

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and actually now very old operational projects.

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That are probably looking to go

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into the next phase and maybe redeveloped.

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So 2025 has been really busy

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and really successful for us as a team, but we’re really excited about 2026.

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We’re already kicking off

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a number of mandates in operational, onshore wind and solar, large DCO solar

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the ready to build stage and some earlier stage development portfolios as well.

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It should be a great 2026.

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Please do get in touch if you’d like to talk to us about any of those projects