Private capital rushes to fund green energy innovators
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CAPITAL MARKETS

Private capital rushes to fund green energy innovators

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Illustration: Peter Crowther

The IPO market has all but closed as rates rise and stock prices fall. But even as they mark existing holdings down, private equity investors will still provide big volumes of new capital to young companies seeking to scale up. The key factor? That those firms are focused on green energy and dealing with the climate crisis. Freed from the noise of public stock markets, these big funds are happy to back their own long-term views of the most promising growth businesses.

On August 24, the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, Glenn Hegar, announced a list of prohibited financial companies including banks and asset managers that he claims boycott energy companies. Texas state entities, including public pension funds, must now divest from them in accordance with the bill that governor Greg Abbot signed into law in June 2021.

The comptroller’s office is attempting to tie these companies, their anti-oil and gas rhetoric and misguided activism around proxy voting to the elevated energy costs Texans face. It points to what it calls an increasingly hostile federal regulatory environment hampering new domestic energy exploration and production.

“My greatest concern is the false narrative that has been created by the environmental crusaders in Washington DC and Wall Street that our economy can completely transition away from fossil fuels, when, in fact, they will be part of our everyday life into the foreseeable future,” Hegar stated.

My greatest concern is the false narrative that has been created by the environmental crusaders in Washington DC and Wall Street
Glenn Hegar, Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts
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Listed companies include BlackRock, Jupiter Fund Management, Schroders and a number of large European banks such as BNP Paribas and Credit Suisse.

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Editorial director
Peter Lee is editorial director. He joined Euromoney straight from Oxford University in 1985, and has written about banking and capital markets ever since, being appointed editor in 1999. He became editorial director of Euromoney in May 2005.
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