VR Capital Group (the United States) is identifies investment opportunities in Ukraine's wind power sector, mulling several projects now, VR Capital Group President Richard Deitz has said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

He said that the company began to study the "green" sector in Ukraine from projects in wind power sector. For some reason the company switched to solar power plants, as these facilities looked more realizable at that time, he said. However, the company continues working on the wind power sector, which is also interesting and attractive for the company. VR Capital Group hopes that in the near future the company will be able to build wind farms in Ukraine, Deitz said.

He recalled that in March, the solar power plant in Kamianets-Podilsky with a capacity of 64 MW (the Podilskenergo managing company) was launched. The co-investors in it on a parity basis were VR Capital Group and the Ukrainian ICU group. On the same conditions, another 35 MW solar power plant was built in Kherson region (the managing company is Solar Capital), which will start operating in the near future.

According to Deitz, by the end of the summer in Mykolaiv region a third joint project with the ICU will be launched. The project is a solar power plant, consisting of 11 facilities with a total peak capacity of about 127 MW.

Thus, the total capacity of the three partner projects to be launched this year is 225 MW, and the total investment is at the level of $180 million, the president of VR Capital Group said.

He called the first experience of implementing projects in the real sector of Ukraine very successful, noting the lack of nuances about which investors have traditionally been concerned about (in particular, timely customs clearance of imported equipment and VAT refunds).

"The contractors did everything according to schedule. The company received regular reports at the main stages, the work was carried out transparently, he said. Today one can say that everything was done at a high enough level in terms of construction quality, although, of course, time will tell, because the service life of equipment is 20-25 years, Deitz said.

VR Capital Group Ltd., through its principal subsidiaries including VR Advisory Services Ltd (together, VR Capital Group) is an alternative asset manager with assets under management in excess of $4.5 billion. VR Capital Group's external client base is primarily composed of institutional investors from the United States and Western Europe, including university endowments, charitable foundations, family offices and institutional asset allocators.

Founded in 2006, ICU is Ukraine's leading asset manager with over $500 million in assets under management. Managing Partners Makar Paseniuk and Konstantin Stetsenko are majority shareholders of ICU.