Renewables are essential to achieving Net Zero, but other infrastructure investments that enable their distribution and empower industries to deploy emissions-reducing strategies are just as critical. 

Here, EQT’s Benjamin Bygott-Webb and Crosby Cook discuss the role of private capital in driving decarbonisation across the entire economy. 

Beyond renewables, what energy solutions are exciting for investors? 

Benjamin Bygott-Webb: Renewables have rightly been front and center, but they won’t solve the energy transition alone. Significant investments in other areas are required if we’re going to keep within the 1.5°C target. We need to invest in the grid to cope with the shift in how power is produced and consumed, in decarbonising the transportation sector, and in Long and Short Duration Storage. For example, UK energy storage company Statera was an investment EQT made to help address grid intermittency that can be caused by deployment of renewables. We also back InstaVolt, which is helping lead the rollout of the public EV rapid charging network in the UK. 

Crosby Cook: We invest in renewables because energy generation is the number one emitter of greenhouse gasses, and there are scalable technologies that can be invested in today. But we also invest in businesses critical to the supporting infrastructure, such as Osmose Utilities Services, which provides resiliency services for upgrading the transmission and distribution grid. We also look for opportunities that enable the consumption of clean energy and electrification of everything. Our fleet charging business Voltera was spun out of our global data center business, EdgeConneX, and leverages expertise from building hyperscale data centres to work with utilities to upgrade connections and distribute electricity for fleet charging.

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