Masdar to increase bond issuances to fund renewables push

• CFO: Masdar to be ‘repeat bond issuer’
• Raised $1bn in green bonds last month
• Green bonds increasingly popular

Masdar, the UAE’s state-owned clean energy developer, is to increase its presence in international debt markets as it accelerates plans to install 100 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by the end of the decade.

Abu Dhabi’s Masdar raised $1 billion in a green bond sale last month, following previous issuances of $750 million in 2023 and $1 billion in 2024. 

Chief financial officer Mazin Khan said the company expects to become a “repeat bond issuer” as it seeks to scale its global portfolio.

“There is a significant amount of growth to come over the next five to six years,” Khan said in an interview with AGBI. “To fund and fuel that growth, we will need financing.”

Masdar is jointly owned by sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Investment, Abu Dhabi state oil company Adnoc and Abu Dhabi National Energy Co, known as Taqa. It has a mandate to lead UAE investment in solar, wind, battery storage and increasingly hydrogen.

Supplied/Masdar

Its latest green bond, which was nearly seven times oversubscribed, was issued in two $500 million tranches with five and 10-year maturities. The bonds carry coupon rates of 4.875 percent and 5.375 percent respectively.

Proceeds are earmarked exclusively for “dark green” projects, those ranked among the most sustainable, across both developed and emerging markets.

“We need to spend that money first, and then we’ll obviously be looking at further funding,” Khan said.

Green bonds are a fast-growing segment of the global debt market. They are fixed-income instruments specifically earmarked to raise money for climate and environmental projects.

Global green bond issuance climbed to a record $1.1 trillion in 2024, marking a 5 percent increase over the previous year, according to the World Bank.

The market for labelled sustainable debt, including green, social, sustainability, sustainability-linked, and transition bonds, reached a cumulative total of $6.2 trillion as of December 2024.

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Masdar has updated its green finance framework to expand eligible investments to include hydrogen, a sector it sees as increasingly critical to decarbonisation efforts.

The company is actively pursuing acquisitions and project development across the Middle East, Europe, North America and former Soviet states. In 2024, it secured $6 billion in non-recourse financing to support 11GW of clean energy projects across 12 developments in nine countries.

Last year Masdar completed the €3.2 billion ($3.64 billion) acquisition of Greece’s Terna Energy, the largest energy deal in the history of the Athens Stock Exchange and one of the biggest in Europe’s renewables sector. In Italy, it is in early-stage talks with Enel over potential collaboration in grid-scale energy storage.

“We’re not buying gigawatts for the sake of buying gigawatts,” said Khan. “We’re buying them as growth engines in those regions.”