The proposed project involves up to US$150 million debt refinancing package for ContourGlobal Hydro Cascade CJSC (the “Company”, an existing IFC investee company) in Armenia. In July 2015, the Company acquired the 404.2MW Vorotan cascade hydropower generation plants in southern Armenia, including the 76MW Spandaryan HPP (commissioned in 1989), the 171MW Shamb HPP (commissioned in 1978) and the 157.2MW Tatev HPP (commissioned in 1970) plants along the Vorotan River (together, the Vorotan Cascade). In 2016, IFC arranged a US$140mn financing package to refinance the second instalment of the privatization (#37652, summary of the investment: https://disclosures.ifc.org/project-detail/ESRS/37652/vorotan-debt).

The Vorotan Cascade is among the main power generation complexes in Armenia, providing both peak and base load generation, and performing grid stabilization services. The Vorotan Cascade is supported by a system of four reservoirs: Spandaryan, Angeghakot, Tolors, Shamb and a Tatev daily regulation pond.

The new financing is aimed to re-leverage the Company, and through doing so support new modernization investments and free up liquidity for renewable energy (RE) pipeline in emerging markets.

IFC aims to provide support to the Company in carrying out comprehensive climate risk and gender assessments and adaptation plan to improve operational performance and resilience of the Project. The objective of the upstream engagement is to help ContourGlobal and the Company to undertake a detailed assessment of climate change risks (physical and social), provide recommendations on climate resilience interventions that could enhance the Projects’ performance and reduce community and environment vulnerabilities to climate hazards, while avoiding maladaptation for the communities and environment, and build capacity in climate change risk management planning in a gender-inclusive way.