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Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure Capital, Inc., a leading investor in climate solutions, and KKR, a leading global investment firm, announced an agreement to establish CarbonCount Holdings 1 LLC to invest up to a combined $2 billion in climate positive projects across the United States.
Per the agreement, signed May 4, 2024, HASI and KKR have each made an initial capital commitment of up to $1 billion to CCH1, to invest up to an aggregate of $2 billion in clean energy assets over the next 18 months. HASI will source the investments for and manage CCH1, remain the interface with its clients, and measure the avoided emissions of all investments in CCH1 using its proprietary CarbonCount® scoring tool. These investments will be consistent with HASI’s existing investment strategy which is focused on behind-the-meter, grid-connected, renewable natural gas and transport projects.
At close, CCH1 will be seeded with assets representing approximately 10% of the up to $2 billion total committed amounts.
“Our strategic partnership with KKR perfectly aligns with our Climate Clients Assets strategy, enabling us to capitalize on our ambitious pipeline of opportunities and scale our business,” said Jeffrey A. Lipson, President and Chief Executive Officer 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 history of success.”
“CCH1 represents a significant milestone in our objective to migrate to a more capital light model and reduce reliance on public equity markets for growth,” said Marc Pangburn, Chief Financial Officer of HASI. “This transaction further increases the resilient, non-cyclical nature of our business.”
“HASI has built an impressive portfolio of sustainable infrastructure projects through strategic partnerships and we believe their pipeline of future opportunities is highly complementary to KKR’s existing clean energy investing strategy,” said Cecilio Velasco, Managing Director on KKR’s Infrastructure team. “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 investing, KKR has invested more than $15 billion in renewable energy and climate-related investments from its infrastructure platform alone. According to BloombergNEF, KKR is the 10th largest owner of solar assets operating and under construction in the U.S. KKR is funding the investment from its core infrastructure strategy.
Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC acted as the financial advisor for KKR, and Lazard acted as financial advisor for HASI.
Related Article: KKR Acquires Majority Stake in Avantus to Drive Renewable Energy Expansion in the U.S.
CarbonCount: Measuring the Climate Impact of Every Investment
HASI only invests in assets that are neutral to negative on incremental carbon emissions or 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 utilizing CarbonCount, a proprietary scoring tool for evaluating real assets to determine the efficiency by which each dollar of invested capital avoids annual carbon dioxide equivalent emissions (CO2e). This first-of-its-kind methodology promotes transparency in project finance by creating a simple and comparable metric for infrastructure projects to be evaluated in terms of how much capital investment is mitigating climate change.