(Photo Credit: JacLou DL, Pixabay)
Goldman Sachs Renewable Power has already received around $1.9 billion in equity capital investments and expects to have approximately $4 billion to invest in renewable energy projects, the company said this week.
The private company, which is part of Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM), owns and manages renewable power assets mainly in the United States. Goldman Sachs Renewable Power’s investor base includes institutions, family offices, and high net worth individuals, GSAM says. The University of California Regents and Goldman Sachs as well as their employees have provided lead commitments to the company.
“We identified Goldman Sachs Renewable Power and its early focus on distributed generation solar as an attractive fit for our portfolio, given its stable cash flow profile that we believe is less correlated to other financial asset classes,” said UC chief investment officer Jagdeep Singh Bachher.
The company is one of the largest owners and operators of distributed generation solar assets in the United States, GSAM said. In March, a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs Renewable Power purchased $86.9 million worth of commercial solar project leases from American solar company SunPower.
Michelle Davis, a senior solar analyst at energy and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, told Greentech Media at the time that the SunPower deal demonstrated that institutional investors are increasingly becoming interested in commercial solar assets.
“Historically, commercial solar projects were small enough that they didn’t meet minimum transaction sizes to be attractive for institutional investors or other financial players like infrastructure funds and pension funds,” Davis said, according to GTM’s Emma Foehringer Merchant. “But as competition for financing these projects has tightened, more players are finding ways to aggregate portfolios of commercial solar assets in order to make up larger deal sizes.”
Jon Yoder, managing director and head of the GSAM Renewable Power Group, said this week that a growing number of corporations, governmental, and educational institutions are committing to renewable energy sources.
“We have already been successful in deploying over $1.4 billion of capital, primarily into distributed generation solar assets here in the United States,” he added.