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Allen Hall, Philip Totaro, and Joel Saxum dive into the potential sale of VSB Group, Hydro Rein’s acquisition of a massive wind portfolio, and Iberdrola increasing its stake in Avangrid. They also analyze Macquarie Capital’s purchase of wind analytics firm ONYX Insight, providing expert insights on these pivotal moves shaping the clean energy industry.
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Allen Hall: I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with the founder and CEO oIntelStor,r, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. And this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you need actionable information about renewable projects or technologies, check out IntelStor at intelstor.com.
Partners Group, a Swiss private equity firm, is exploring options including a potential sale for German renewable energy company VSB Group. The sale process could begin in the second quarter of VSB’s valuation estimated between 3. One and two billion dollars, including debt. If the sale proceeds, VSB is expected to attract interest from infrastructure funds and utilities.
The possible sale comes amid a drop in renewable asset values, although interest in the sector remains high, obviously, in the European Union and aims for about 42 percent of the block’s energy in renewables by 2030. Phil, this is another sale, possible sale, in the billions of dollars. These numbers are huge. Renewable energy, although there’s been a lot of pundits about renewable energy, it is still worth a lot of value.
Philip Totaro: Indeed. And this is continuing to move along the same trend that we’ve seen recently in the industry, where you’ve got a lot of infrastructure funds now loading up on renewable energy asset owners, operators, developers, et cetera because they want to be able to have somebody with experience in the space.
So it’s certainly, a better strategy for them than, just developing greenfield projects themselves or partnering with somebody else to do that. And to be honest, a lot of the asset developers want to be able to sell off whatever chunk of a project they might still own by the time it’s commissioned because they want the capital to be able to redeploy in building new greenfield projects.
So you know, eventually you’re going to start seeing more and more just like you do in other industries. And we’ve been talking about this on Newsflash. Joel’s mentioned it numerous times about how. Infrastructure funds are just getting really, warmed up and excited about piling into these type of asset owners.
Allen Hall: Hydro Rein, a Norwegian renewable energy company, has reached an agreement with Swedish developer IOWN Energy to acquire 80 percent stake in a 2. 4 gigawatt portfolio of wind power projects under development in Sweden and Norway. The portfolio comprises 23 projects in Sweden and two in Norway, all of which are in the early stages of development.
Hydro Rein and IOWN will collaborate to advance these projects, engaging with local stakeholders and aiming to make their initial investments before 2030. Sweden and Norway active in renewables right now, a lot more than I thought they would be at this point. So they are stepping on the accelerator pedal again.
Philip Totaro: Yeah, and this one’s interesting because, Hydro Rein is obviously a utility company that has a lot of renewable assets already. Obviously in, in the hydro space mostly, but they want to be able to diversify into wind and solar. And so this is actually a really good a really good step for them to take.
Again, it’s an 80 percent stake in a pretty decent sized portfolio in 2. 4 gigawatts. You’re, you’re talking about having utility companies ensure that they have all their bases covered in terms of diversity of renewable energy supply. I think this represents a really clever deal on their part.
Joel Saxum: It’s interesting to me because we’ve talked to last week and this is a known fact that actually the, some of the Scandinavian wind developers are struggling right now. They’re in a tough, they’re in a tough operating environment. Icing is rampant up there. They get lighting. They got a lot of issues up there.
With specific deploying the specific technologies. However, if some of those issues can be resolved, there is, there’s some HVDC lines up there that are exports. So now you can start triaging and selling energy as renewable energy as export. Cause if you know a little bit about this, like the Norwegian market is mostly all renewables anyways, cause it’s a lot of hydro up there, sweet.
This in the Swedish market is very heavy on renewables. So I think that what you see here is more of a, it’s less of a, our grid needs it and more of a financial play to sell these, this renewable energy of the export in my mind.
Allen Hall: Iberdrola, the Spanish multinational electric utility company has launched an offer to acquire an additional 18. 4 percent of the. capital of its U. S. subsidiary, Avangrid. The company is offering a little over 34 per share, representing a 10 percent premium compared to the weighted average share price over the last 30 days. This transaction would increase Iberdrola’s exposure to network business in the United States, a key market for the company’s growth in the regulated businesses.
Phil, Iberdrola already holds a huge stake in Avangrid. Why would they be grabbing another almost 20 percent of it?
Philip Totaro: Yeah, this is a great question. So it’s actually having to do with asset repowering because remember how we’ve talked in the last few weeks and months about how Avangrid kind of building up their cash portfolio and they’re getting to a point where a lot of the Avangrid assets in the United States onshore webinar Are up for repowering in the next, three to five years a decent chunk of their portfolio as well as their offshore project ambitions.
And so that’s the other aspect of this that I think is driving this investment decision to have a hundred percent control is they want to be able to deploy capital to and go attract capital as well. To be able to build these offshore projects that they have in their pipeline throughout the Northeast and even the Kitty Hawk project, which is still remains in a bit of limbo, but they’re optimistic they can move that one forward too.
Having full control of Avangrid would certainly help facilitate that process in terms of them raising the money they want to be able to raise.
Joel Saxum: If you’re a bean counter over at Iberdrola, one of the accounting people. And you have Avangrid sitting in your portfolio, you already own a majority stake in it, it’s your company basically, and it’s profitable, why not acquire the rest of it to get access to more of that profit?
Allen Hall: Macquarie Capital has announced its acquisition of Onyx Insight, the leading provider of wind turbine performance analytics and condition based monitoring to the wind industry. Onyx, which has been part of BP Launchpad since 2017, currently monitors more than 17, 000 turbines in over 30 countries, providing technology solutions to 7 out of the top 10 wind asset owners.
Following the acquisition, Onyx will continue to operate as an independent business, offering its integrated suite of technologies and services to help wind turbine owners, operators, and manufacturers optimize turbine performance, reduce downtime, and improve performance. anticipate operational issues.
The Onyx deal has been bouncing around for months if you’ve been listening in the corners of trade shows. You’ve been hearing talk of this for a while. Phil, does this acquisition make sense? Because Macquarie is involved in so many different areas. It’s essentially just bolstering Onyx to just keep producing at this point, keep going.
Philip Totaro: I think I’m actually really excited and happy for them that this happened, because I think this is an exceptionally good fit for what Onyx is trying to do. It gives Onyx exposure to an asset portfolio that the larger Macquarie group has that spans I don’t even remember how many countries at this point, but it’s, it’s like 40 different countries that I think Macquarie has.
Operational assets or an interest in a development pipeline for both wind and solar. Obviously Onyx monitors wind assets. And, with the technology that they’ve developed to basically reverse engineer a lot of the CMS and SCADA technology that an asset owner may not have access to I think it’s been a really clever play from them to be able to build the toolkit that they’ve got because they, have something that you mentioned, 17, 000 turbines.
I think it’s something like 90, I want to say around 90 gigawatts globally. Which is a pretty, that’s a pretty good chunk of the market. So, it’s giving Onyx great exposure in terms of getting their technology deployed on the Macquarie fleet. And let’s keep in mind that Macquarie’s also, a minority or a majority owner in a lot of offshore assets as well.
So this is going to give Onyx a tremendous amount of growth opportunity. And it’s aI think it’s actually a better fit than some of the other deals that had, potentially been proposed. It was You know, there were some companies that they could have gotten together with that would have been complimentary in terms of asset monitoring and management.
But I think working with an asset owner like McQuarrie group is just fantastic. So this one’s at the top of my list.
Joel Saxum: I’m with you, Phil. I like this one a lot, and I think that it’s It spells out big growth for Onyx, right? You’ve the, they had a great partner come and launch with BP. Now they’re going to be with the Macquarie group and they’re going to have access to a lot of turbines.
There’s a lot of learning that can be done from that. We always talk about, Hey, OEMs aren’t sharing data or whatever that may be. But Onyx has gone to what they’ve done so far. They’ve gone into the backend and reverse engineered things and made that data and those insights available. Now they’re going to get access to more and more.
Of the Global Wind Turbine Fleet, and we’re gonna hopefully see a lot of other great things come out of the Onyx Garage.
