A US$67.3mn sum has been paid out for the development of six wind farms in northeast Brazil.

Brazil’s development bank the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES) and the New Development Bank (NDB) carried out the disbursement on Tuesday, having first agreed to the financing deal last year.

The payment, which marks the first joint disbursement for a Brazilian project between the two parties, will go towards wind farms based in Piauí (PI) and Pernambuco (PE) states, on Brazil’s northeastern coast. The wind farms are part of renewable energy firm Casa dos Ventos Group’s Araripe 3 Wind Farm Complex, made up of 14 sites in the regions of Simões and Currais Novos, PI, and Araripina, PE. In total, the complex will have a capacity of 358 megawatts (MW) generated by 156 turbines.

It marks a milestone in the two banks’ US$300mn contract, signed last year, to develop infrastructure in wind, solar and hydroelectric energy. The funds from the collaboration are expected to contribute around 600MW to Brazil’s renewable energy generation capacity.

Commenting on the disbursement, BNDES president Dyogo Oliveira tells GTR it “is an important step for the BNDES in approaching more banks and multilateral agencies”.

Oliveira is in Washington DC for the IMF spring meetings. “We will have meetings with the World Bank and IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) during this trip, so that we can carry more resources to finance projects in Brazil,” he says.

The deal is the largest ever since the NDB, a multilateral institution formerly known as the Brics bank, opened for business in 2015.

BNDES’ focus on renewables comes after the institution was implicated in the Car Wash corruption probe in 2016 and subsequently pledged greater transparency and project-focused policies. Further bribery revelations – uncovered in an investigation known as Operation Bullish – resulted in the resignation of the bank’s president Maria Silvia Bastos last May.