Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure Capital, Inc. (HASI)a leading climate solutions investor and investment fund KKRhave announced an agreement to establish CarbonCount Holdings 1 LLC (“CCH1”), a new vehicle to invest up to a combined $2 billion in climate positive projects across the United States.
Under the agreement, HASI and KKR have each made an initial capital commitment of up to $1 billion for CCH1, and will invest up to a total of $2 billion in clean energy assets over the next 18 months.
HASI will source the investments and manage CCH1, remain the interface with its customers, and measure avoided emissions from all investments in CCH1 using its proprietary CarbonCount scoring tool. These investments will be consistent with HASI’s existing investment strategy, which focuses on renewable, grid-connected and behind-the-meter natural gas and transportation projects.
At closing, CCH1 will have assets representing approximately 10% of the total committed amounts of up to 2 billion.
KKR is the tenth largest owner of solar assets in the US“Our strategic partnership with KKR aligns perfectly with our Climate Client Asset strategy, allowing us to capitalize on our ambitious pipeline of opportunities and scale our business,” said Jeffrey A. Lipson, president and CEO of HASI. “We are excited to collaborate with the KKR team, who share our commitment to accelerating the energy transition and whose interest in the relationship serves as a testament to HASI’s success story.”
“CCH1 represents an important milestone in our goal to migrate to a less capital-intensive model and reduce reliance on public equity markets for growth,” said Marc Pangburn, HASI Chief Financial Officer. “This transaction further enhances the resilient and non-cyclical nature of our business.”
“HASI has built an impressive portfolio of sustainable infrastructure projects through strategic partnerships and we believe its pipeline of future opportunities is highly complementary to KKR’s existing clean energy investment strategy,” said Cecilio Velasco, CEO of the HASI team. KKR infrastructure. “We look forward to working together to advance projects in the sustainable infrastructure space and accelerate the energy transition.”
With over 15 years of experience in infrastructure investments, KKR has invested over $15 billion in renewable energy and climate-related investments from its infrastructure platform alone. According to BloombergNEF, KKR is the tenth largest owner of solar assets in operation and under construction in the US. KKR is funding the investment from its core infrastructure strategy.
Finally, Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC acted as financial advisor to KKR and Lazard acted as financial advisor to HASI.
CarbonCount: Measuring the climate impact of each investment
HASI only invests in assets that range from neutral to negative in terms of incremental carbon emissions or that have some other tangible environmental benefit, such as reducing water consumption.
Since 2013, HASI has tracked and reported on the impact of all its investments using CarbonCount, a proprietary scoring tool to evaluate real assets and determine how efficiently each dollar of invested capital prevents annual carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions. .
Additionally, this first-of-its-kind methodology promotes transparency in project financing by creating a simple, comparable metric for infrastructure projects to be evaluated in terms of how much capital investment is mitigating climate change.
