CIP’s Flagship Fund On Track to Become World’s Largest Dedicated to Greenfield Renewable Energy Investments

Business & Finance

July 11, 2023, by Adrijana Buljan

Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP) has reached the first close on its fifth flagship fund, Copenhagen Infrastructure V (CI V), at EUR 5.6 billion in capital commitments received. This puts the fund on track to reach its target size of EUR 12 billion, which would make this the world’s largest dedicated greenfield renewable energy fund, according to CIP.

“The fund will focus on greenfield investments within large-scale renewable energy infrastructure. It has a global reach and intends to diversify investments across technologies such as contracted offshore wind, energy storage, onshore wind and solar in low-risk OECD countries in North America, Western Europe, and Asia Pacific”, the offshore wind and renewable energy developer said in a press release on 10 July.

The first close of the flagship fund saw a large group of leading institutional investors across continental Europe, the Nordics, the UK, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region.

CIP noted that there is a strong interest from additional investors already in process, so CI V is on the way to reaching its target fund size of EUR 12 billion.

The fund now has ownership of more than 40 renewable energy infrastructure projects with a total potential CI V commitment of approximately EUR 20 billion, corresponding to more than 150 per cent of the target fund size.

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Based on the current portfolio, CI V is targeting to add an estimated 20 GW of new clean energy capacity to the grid, enough to power more than 10 million average households with renewable energy, CIP says.

“We believe the market timing for investment of CI V is favourable. The strong and accelerating demand for new renewable infrastructure to secure energy independence and deliver on ambitious climate pledges creates many new investment opportunities”, said Jakob Baruël Poulsen, Managing Partner at CIP.

“Our large investment pipeline and broad capabilities across all major renewable technologies and presence in all key markets enable us to select the best projects for the fund and to build a well-diversified portfolio”.

Along with offshore wind, the funds managed by CIP focus on investments in onshore wind, solar PV, biomass and energy-from-waste, transmission and distribution, reserve capacity, storage, advanced bioenergy, and Power-to-X.

In offshore wind, CIP is currently building one of the first US utility-scale offshore wind farms, Vineyard Wind 1, together with Avangrid, and has numerous projects in planning or development in Europe, Asia Pacific and the Americas region.

In 2022, CIP also proposed to build an artificial island for large-scale production of green hydrogen from offshore wind.

The island, called BrintØ (Hydrogen Island), would be located in the Danish part of the North Sea and is planned to have the capacity to be able to supply “an unprecedented amount of green hydrogen” by 2030.

The investor-developer also has a proposal for the Danish artificial North Sea Energy Island, for which the decision to launch a tender was recently paused by the government.