Mitsui & Co, Japan's second-biggest trading house, said on Friday it will buy a 50 percent stake in a wind power plant in the United States to tap into a growing market.
Mitsui will pay 10 billion yen ($93.28 million) to the stake in Royal/Dutch Shell Group's 160-megawatt wind power plant in Brazos, Texas, it said.
It also plans to invest additional 30 billion yen ($279.8 million) in US and European wind power projects by 2007, including plans to build wind power units offshore Scotland and near the Rocky Mountains in the US, a spokesman said.
"The wind power business is expanding rapidly and we want to tap into it," a Mitsui spokesman said. "This is first time for us to get into the wind power business outside Japan."
The spokesman said the investment in Shell's Brazos plant included 5 billion yen financing for material procurement.
Mitsui and Shell are already partners in the Sakhalin-2 gas and oil project in Russia's Far East.
Shell has focused on solar and wind energy businesses since 1997 and has such projects in more than 75 countries, according to its company Website.