LEGO Owners Put $500 Million into Offshore Wind Farm in Germany
Wouldn’t it be cool to build a wind farm out of LEGOs? They must have such options now, eh? Especially now that we see LEGO’s owners are wind power fans,.. or that they just see the financial benefits of investing in wind power.
As reported yesterday by Reuters, the family firm that owns LEGO is buying approximately one-third of a new offshore wind farm in Germany. The investment will provide LEGO with all of its needed energy up through 2020.
“Lego’s parent company, Kirkbi A/S, will invest 3 billion crowns ($534 million) for a 32 percent stake in DONG Energy’s 277-megawatt Borkum Riffgrund 1 wind farm, which is scheduled to be fully operational in 2015,” Reuters reports
“For DONG, which has previously sold stakes in wind farms to institutional investors like pension insurance groups, the deal represents a key widening of its investor base to include corporate groups for the first time.”
This investment also lets LEGO market that it invests in wind power with the new WindMade logo.
“This investment supports the Lego Group’s ambitious environmental goals,” Kirkbi Chief Executive Soren Thorup Sorensen told Reuters. “This also provides a solid long-term investment for us with a reasonable return.”
But this was no minor step — it’s the first time Kirkbi has invested directly in an energy project and is “is a sizeable investment” for the company, according to Sorensen.
As Andrew noted last week, renewable energy investments are increasingly coming from the corporate world, which sees them as sound, high-ROI long-term investments. (Note Google’s early and strong leadership in this respect, as well as Apple’s announcement this week that it is building the largest end-user-owned solar array in the U.S.) I would say, expect to see more and more of this sort of announcement.
LEGO Man via de Raaf
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