← all field notes

Energy · mag 2.0

Orchidea

Orchidea Energy Fund

Role · Investor / OperatorStatus · Active · raising

A distributed-solar investment vehicle I'm structuring around small-scale solar in Guatemala.

The thesis

Guatemala has a liberalized electricity market, and there's a quiet sweet spot in it: sub-5 MW solar projects. Small enough to face less competition and faster permitting, large enough to matter, with per-project tax incentives and cash flows that are effectively dollarized — which strips out a lot of the currency risk that scares international capital away from the region. The idea is to aggregate a pipeline of these smaller projects — originated and built by independent local developers — into one well-structured vehicle that connects that pipeline to investor capital. We structure and aggregate; the developers build.

What I do here

I'm the operator on the structuring side. That means building the financial model, designing the vehicle and its governance, drafting the institutional-grade legal framework, preparing the investor materials, running the developer and sponsor pipeline, and negotiating the agreements that turn a project into part of the fund. I do the analytical work and the relationship work — the model and the table.

What's built

Where it stands

The structuring phase — model, materials, market analysis — is done. The active work now is running developer negotiations and investor conversations in parallel and finalizing the legal frameworks. Pre-first-close, and deliberately so: two earlier energy vehicles got killed to focus everything here.

Nearby stars

Sister effort to El Trejo on the energy side — same operator, same tooling, different country and counterparties. Both run on Alpicat's brains and AI infrastructure.