Marianne Anton

Full Profile

Marianne is a Partner in the Projects and Construction team. Marianne is an energy specialist based in London, and her practice includes advising on a broad range of energy matters and renewable technologies, from corporate and commercial transactions to compliance with regulatory requirements, and power market restructures. Marianne has previously worked in-house for Ofgem’s Offshore Transmission legal team, and has undertaken a secondment with National Grid in Warwick.

Marianne regularly advises clients on the GB industry governance (codes and licences) and the legislative framework for energy projects (including battery storage projects), on grid connection arrangements, and on renewables subsidy schemes such as ROCs, FITs and CfDs, REGOs, and the Capacity Market. Further afield, her regulatory experience is helpful in assisting clients to navigate less developed renewables markets, where understanding the right questions to ask is critical in understanding local legislative requirements. Marianne has extensive experience negotiating power purchase agreements of all varieties, from smaller on-site private wire PPAs, to corporate sleeved PPAs (acting for renewable generators and corporate offtakers), and virtual corporate PPAs (acting for renewable generators). Her practice encompasses such arrangements in GB, and across Europe including on the first corporate PPAs in Greece.

Experience

• Advising a European electricity trading house on the negotiation of a PPA with a related entity hydrogen producer (as offtaker), structured to ensure compliance with the UK Low Carbon Hydrogen Standard.
• Advising a joint owner of an offshore oil and gas platform (as offtaker) on the structuring and negotiation of heads of terms for a PPA with an onshore solar farm.
• Advising Enipeas Single-Member SA, a subsidiary of Lightsource bp, on its PPA negotiations for the Enipeas project in Greece, one of the largest solar projects in Europe with a nominal capacity of 560 MW. The PPA arrangements provided the revenue certainty to support the project financing, which included €170m from the Greek government’s Recovery and Resilience Fund ‘Greece 2.0’, along with €145.34m from Eurobank.
• Advising a JV in relation to a planned interconnector between the UK and Germany, including on connection arrangements, planning issues, licence obligations and analysis and licence negotiation in respect of variation requests (in particular related to financing and corporate structure).
• Advising the Mexican Ministry of Energy (SENER) on the reform of the electricity industry in Mexico. The reform of the energy market included the opening of electricity generation to the private sector, the creation of a wholesale electricity market, legal separation of the incumbent utility companies, market opening to the private sector, the introduction of clean energy obligations and many other major changes. The reform was the biggest change to the Mexican electricity market in over forty years.
• Advising Ofgem on bespoke tender design and process, including project eligibility for participation in OFTO tenders, analysis of developer drafted documents (including transfer agreements, interface agreements, operations and maintenance agreements) and evaluation of competitive tenders submitted by bidders.
• Advising NIE on the creation of a cross-jurisdictional All Island Single Electricity Market project in the island of Ireland, which created a single wholesale market for electricity.