Blackstone Acquires Westwood, Corio Offshore in Brazil

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Blackstone has acquired a majority stake in Westwood Professional Services. Corio Generation signed a memorandum of understanding with Brazilian shipyard EBR to explore offshore wind in Brazil. AGL Energy has acquired Firm Power and Terrain Solar for $250 million Australian.

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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 of IntelStor, 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 want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at IntelStor.com.

Australian utility giant AGL Energy has announced a major acquisition, agreeing to purchase two domestic renewable energy developers, battery storage specialist Firm Power and solar farm developer Terrain Solar for 250 million Australian dollars. This deal will add an impressive 8. 1 gigawatts to AGL’s development pipeline, bringing their total to over 14 gigawatts.

The acquisition includes 6. 1 gigawatts of battery storage projects across five states, 1. 8 gigawatts of solar schemes, and 250 megawatts of onshore wind project in New South Wales. AGL CEO Damian Nix emphasized that this high quality pipeline will help firm renewable energy generation as thermal baseload generation exits the national electricity market.

Now Phil There’s been a lot of discussion most recently in Australia about removing natural gas and other forms of thermal energy from the electricity grid. This makes a lot of sense for AGL to step into the void, right?

Philip Totaro: It does. And when you also consider that they’ve had a lot of, recent price fluctuations which a lot of wind and solar opponents were trying to blame on wind and solar, but in reality, it’s, it’s because they don’t have the right kind of balance and mix in the electricity market.

And as we talked about on the show before as well They don’t have intrastate energy trading and market balancing that allows them to really take advantage of supply and demand disparities. So the fact that AGL, which is kind of a national utility, they have the ability to do things, across multiple states that will be to the benefit of the entire grid and state level stability.

Joel Saxum: So the, the, one of the things I love about what a Australia does in the renewable energy grid is they’re, they make pretty good moves to, to really remove some of the old stuff. And their solar gen generation and their wind generation are kicking butt. But what this deal, really what shines in this deal to me, is the 6.1 gigawatts of battery storage.

So whether you’re using battery storage. Depending on what kind of battery storage it is, because batteries don’t mean, double A’s that you have in your calculator. They can be all kinds of different things. But it’s a really good way to get rid of the thermal base load generation, because if there is slowdowns, in peak periods or whatever, the batteries can kick in to make that happen.

So, of this, these acquisitions, 6. 1 gigawatts of battery storage is really nice to see, and I’m excited to see some of the same things start to happen in the United States.

Allen Hall: Offshore wind developer Corio Generation has signed a memorandum of understanding with Brazilian shipyard EBR. This partnership aims to explore offshore wind development along Brazil’s south coast.

Specifically, the company is looking at how EBR’s existing infrastructure near Rio Grande port could support two planned 1, 200 megawatt wind farms, the Casino Offshore Wind and Rio Grande Offshore Wind projects. Even though Brazil has been quiet. Recently, there now seems to be renewed activity south of the equator.

Philip Totaro: They’re trying to get their act together with federal policy still hasn’t been finalized yet. So we’re still several years away from this happening, but one of the world’s largest infrastructure funds that already owns or co owns a lot of offshore winders developing a lot of offshore wind around the world, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, throughout Europe.

And now getting something in place in Brazil, that’s going to allow them to facilitate the the site assessment and the construction of, these, these projects that are a part of a rather sizable portfolio at this point. I think the last time that we updated our project tracking in Brazil at IntelStor, it was more than about 140 gigawatts worth of projects that have been proposed in the market.

At this point so they’re, they’re well underway to try to develop, this, this pipeline and the fact that Corio is making it a point to enter into the market with this MOU is, is going to help facilitate everybody’s confidence in getting the policies in place that are going to unlock the investment.

Joel Saxum: From past knowledge of working in Brazil, the Brazilians know how to get it done offshore. And this is from the oil and gas world. They’ve they’ve been very successful in some of their developments there, and they’re going to take the same skills and knowledge that they’ve built in that space and transferred over to the wind industry kind of like we’re doing in the U.S. If we develop in the Gulf or what happened to wind energy in the North Atlantic in Brazil. So they’re positioned to do do it right. And they’re getting in the early stages of getting some shipyards involved. And I know they make some good boats down there. I’ve been on some Ulstein vessels and they’re very nice.

Allen Hall: Blackstone’s energy transition arm has acquired a majority stake in Westwood Professional Services, a key player in renewable energy project engineering and design. While the exact terms weren’t disclosed, this acquisition is part of Blackstone’s significant push into the energy transition space. For With committed investments of 1.

3 billion since June. Westwood focuses on front end engineering design services for renewable energy generation, power grid, and infrastructure projects. So again Blackstone is making another move. What is the grand scheme? For them moving forward through 24 and into, into 25.

Philip Totaro: Well, this is actually relates back to something that Joel mentioned on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast last week, which is, these big infrastructure funds are now getting wind of the fact that independent service providers are going to be a bigger part of.

The overall operations and maintenance space as they start plucking some deals away from from OEMs or asset owners and operators really want to be able to shift and have a way of doing that. So having a company like Westwood, which also recently made, within the past two years or so made a couple of acquisitions themselves to bolster their business.

Having them now backed up by a company like Blackstone is an enormous vote of confidence in, having their services backstopped, having the liabilities associated with performing that kind of operations of maintenance capability backstopped. So I think it’s, it’s a really clever play and it’s probably not the last of those kinds of deals that is likely to happen where an infrastructure fund steps in and starts backing up an ISP.

Joel Saxum: I think there’s a trend here that Phil’s touching on that you’re starting to hear with some of the investment companies and some of the, consultants and stuff in this space is how can we de risk the entire renewables industry by adding, more. Expertise together. So are we adding ISPs and engineering and front end and, and people that own assets?

How can we, the big players like a Blackstone can, they can pull up some cash and grab three, four of these companies, put them together. And now all of a sudden you’ve got a conglomerate that can do everything. Own their own assets, operate their own assets, do their own engineering, do their own development, and then you de risk an entire portfolio that way.

So I think we’re going to see, I mean, of course, we talk about we’re going to see more, we’re going to see more, we’re going to see more, but I think this is going to be a big trend. I mean, you look at, look at a Brookfield or someone of that sort, that’s what they’re doing right now. And it’s it’s playing out well.