Sectors

The construction boom did its work. Bulgaria installed roughly 1.4 GW of solar in 2025 and entered the EU’s top-ten solar markets for the first time, with the large majority coming from ground-mounted utility plants. With that much capacity now built, capital naturally moves from greenfield development toward acquiring and optimising existing assets.

At the same time, the revenue basis has shifted. The practical result is a market increasingly driven by corporate power purchase agreements and merchant revenue, with direct subsidy dependence fading. A merchant-only solar asset is exposed; a solar asset with a solid PPA and a good grid connection is a different, far more financeable proposition. The best-known players are already building exactly this way - pairing solar with long-term offtake and adding storage for flexibility.

The point for an acquirer is simple: the asset worth buying is the one whose connection and contract position let you do more than sell power - add storage, provide system services, and stabilise the cash flow a bank wants to see.

An investor came to us with a precise brief - the kind that cannot be answered by browsing a market. They were not looking for the highest headline return. They were looking for an asset that combined high return with secure, predictable cash flow - and they understood that, in this market, that security could realistically come only through a PPA.

That requirement was not a constraint we had to work around. It was the heart of the thesis, and it aligned three interests at once:

• The investor wanted return and durability, not one at the expense of the other.
• The PPA was the mechanism that delivered the durability - a contracted revenue floor beneath the merchant upside.
• The bank welcomed exactly this, because a secured offtake is what turns a solar asset into something a lender can comfortably finance.

And underneath all of it sat the grid connection. A strong connection was the non-negotiable, because it is what would later unlock the battery and the additional services that make the asset more than a power plant.

Finding an asset that satisfied all of these at once is not a matter of searching a database. It is a matter of knowing the market from the inside.

The value we brought was knowledge grounded in real transactions, applied through a disciplined process.

We analysed the market from the position of a buyer, not a spectator. Public information on Bulgarian assets is notoriously fragmented - ownership is often indirect, held through SPVs and holding structures, and pipeline claims are difficult to verify. We cut through that to identify which assets were real, who controlled them, and - critically - which ones had the connection quality and contract position the mandate required.

We structured the information so a decision could be made. Raw market noise does not support an investment committee. We organised what we found into a clear, comparable picture, so the investor could see not just candidate assets but why each did or did not fit the thesis.

We conducted buy-side due diligence. We took the buyer’s chair and stress-tested the target the way an acquirer must - the grid connection, the PPA terms, the technical condition, and the room to add a battery later. The aim was to confirm that the asset would still stand up once the excitement of a deal gave way to the reality of ownership.

We structured the sale. We shaped the transaction itself - aligning the terms so the acquisition delivered the return-plus-security profile the investor came for, and so the PPA and connection were preserved as the foundation for the next phase.

The mandate has moved from thesis to transaction. We identified an asset matching the investor’s specific parameters - the return, the secure PPA-backed cash flow, and the grid connection that keeps the storage option open - carried out the buy-side due diligence, and structured the sale. The financing is the next step, and it is work we are set to lead.

The through-line matters. What let us deliver was not a literature review of the solar market. It was knowledge earned by sitting across the table from investors and understanding what they are truly buying - a return they can trust, a cash flow a bank will back, and a connection that turns a plant into a platform.

Bulgarian solar has crossed a threshold. The value is no longer only in building - it is in acquiring the right asset and making it more, through storage and the services a strong connection unlocks. But finding that asset is not a search problem; it is a knowledge problem. The investors who win are the ones who understand, before anyone else, which project’s fundamentals will still matter after the deal closes.

That knowledge is what we bring - earned not from the headlines, but from the mandates. The market shows what is for sale. Understanding what is worth buying is what we do.

The timing was not accidental. Over roughly two years, Bulgaria moved from a marginal position to one of Europe’s most intensive battery-storage markets relative to the size of its electricity system. By mid-2026, cumulative installed storage capacity had surged from under 190 MWh at the end of 2024 to almost 11,700 MWh, making Bulgaria the EU’s fastest-growing BESS market for newly installed capacity.

Two shifts made this possible. In 2024, the energy law and electricity trading rules were amended to recognise storage facilities as independent market participants, which for the first time gave standalone batteries a clear legal footing. And a state-backed auction programme accelerated deployment far beyond official targets.

But the more interesting signal for an investor is what is happening beyond the subsidies. Almost all major new projects are now planned with storage, and a new group of standalone battery assets is emerging - assets not tied to a specific solar park, operating instead on market conditions, price spreads and system needs. Importantly, most of these projects have no European funding. In other words, capital is flowing into batteries on a merchant basis - on the strength of the business case alone.

That is precisely where analysis stops being a formality and becomes the whole decision.

For a standalone battery, the value of the asset lives almost entirely in a set of assumptions about the future - and those assumptions are unusually fragile.

The dominant revenue logic is arbitrage: charging when power is cheap and discharging when it is expensive. The spreads have been dramatic - illustrated by moves from around €8 per MWh to more than €200 later in the same day - and such spreads have allowed projects to attract capital even without direct subsidies. However, this creates a risk: as more batteries enter the system, they absorb more low-cost electricity and discharge more during peaks, gradually eroding the very price differences that arbitrage depends on. The central challenge is how these assets will earn money once you can no longer rely on arbitrage alone.

This is the trap in modelling a battery. It is easy to build a model that looks excellent if today’s spreads persist. It is much harder - and far more valuable - to build one that tells you what happens when they don’t. An investor allocating serious capital does not need the optimistic case. They need to know where the floor is.

So our work centred on the questions that actually move a decision:

• What do the cash flows look like under conservative, not headline, spread assumptions?
• How does the revenue stack degrade as the market saturates - and does the project still clear the return threshold when it does?
• Given that revenue profile, how much debt can the asset genuinely support without becoming fragile?
• Do the IRR and NPV hold across a range of scenarios, or only in the base case?

Debt capacity was the crux. A battery’s ability to carry leverage is only as strong as the reliability of its worst plausible year - not its best. Sizing debt to an arbitrage boom is how a good asset becomes a distressed one.

The value we added was not a spreadsheet. It was judgment applied through a disciplined structure.

We modelled the revenue stack honestly. We did not treat current spreads as permanent. We built the cash flows to reflect a market that is adding storage quickly, and we tested how the returns behaved as arbitrage margins compressed over the asset’s life. The goal was to show the investor the shape of the risk, not to flatter the project.

We separated the asset’s quality from the market’s noise. Bulgaria’s storage story carries a lot of momentum, and momentum makes assumptions lazy. We anchored each project to its own fundamentals - its configuration, its duration, its grid position - rather than to the market’s average enthusiasm.

We sized debt to durability, not to the peak. We derived debt capacity from the cash flows that survive a conservative scenario, so that the leverage recommendation would hold if the market softened rather than only if it stayed hot. This is the difference between a capital structure that looks efficient and one that stays solvent.

We made every number traceable. For an investor of this scale, an unsupported figure is worse than no figure. Each output could be followed back to its assumption, and each assumption could be defended. That traceability is what lets a sophisticated team stress-test our work and still trust it.

The analysis did its job: it gave the investor a clear, defensible basis for deciding which of the Bulgarian projects merited capital, how much debt each could carry, and what return to expect under realistic - not optimistic - conditions.

But the relationship did not stop at analysis, and this is where the engagement became something larger. Once the client saw the depth of our market knowledge, they asked a different question: what do you have? They wanted to see the projects we ourselves were holding. What began as an advisory mandate to value someone else’s assets turned into a conversation about our own pipeline - because credible analysis had established us not just as capable analysts, but as a serious counterpart in the market.

From there the mandate widened in two directions. The client engaged us on a buy-side mandate - representing their interests in acquiring assets - and on the negotiation of financing for those assets. The same discipline that made our valuation trustworthy is exactly what a buyer and a borrower need: a clear-eyed view of what an asset is truly worth, and a debt structure sized to what it can genuinely carry.

The trajectory is worth pausing on. We were brought in to answer a technical question. We answered it well enough that the client wanted to see our projects, extended us to assess assets outside Bulgaria, and then trusted us to act on their behalf in acquisition and financing. Each step was earned by the one before it.

Underlining all of this: our work was reviewed by members of the client’s team with more than 25 years of experience in the sector - people who have seen many advisors and many models. A single engagement can be won on a proposal. A buy-side mandate and a financing negotiation, granted by veterans of the industry, are earned only by the quality of the work itself.

Bulgaria’s battery market is one of the most dynamic in Europe, and the appetite to build - increasingly without any grant - shows how much conviction sits behind it. But conviction is not the same as valuation. The projects that deserve capital are separated from those that merely look attractive by the quality of the analysis behind them.

That is where we start, but it is not where we stop. Rigorous analysis is what opens the door; it is what turned a valuation mandate into a buy-side and financing relationship, and a Bulgarian engagement into a cross-border one. The market provides the opportunity. Disciplined analysis is what makes it investable - and what earns the trust to be asked, again and again, to do more.

We combine financial modelling with review of feedstock, operating, offtake and financing assumptions. Scenarios test changes in input volumes, operating performance, pricing, cost and debt terms.

The result is a traceable model and risk allocation that investors and lenders can challenge, understand and use in their decision-making.

• Integrated project models and asset valuations.
• Feedstock, operating and revenue sensitivity analysis.
• Contract and risk-allocation review.
• Financing, transaction and due-diligence support.