By Sheldon Kimber, CEO, Intersect Power
It’s been a tough year for clean energy but adversity favors the strong and we at Intersect Power have never been stronger. Since we closed on $130M of equity at the end of 2020 we have delivered on nearly every milestone of an incredibly ambitious plan to go from a well respected but small developer to one of the largest owners of solar and storage in North America. The business plan underlying that financing had us tripling our headcount while contracting, financing and building over 2.2GWp of solar and 1.4GWh of battery storage in the space of 30 months. But the ambition didn’t stop there. The plan also had us developing a large pipeline of late stage renewable, storage and green hydrogen assets that could begin to come online from 2024 to 2028.
Today we have achieved almost all of the necessary pieces to realize this vision. Our near term portfolio is under construction and nearing operations. We have executed on innovative short term offtake structures and repeatedly proven that we can finance projects with this revenue profile. Our pipeline of solar and storage assets puts us in position to triple the size of the operating portfolio to over 7.5GWp and 5GWh between 2023 and 2028. Finally, our pipeline of green hydrogen projects positions us to become one of the first and largest clean hydrogen suppliers in North America, vertically integrated from sun and wind through to liquid and gaseous fuels. If you want to see that it is possible to rapidly scale a business built out of steel, and not lines of code, look no further than Intersect Power.
Today we are taking the next step in the rapid growth of our business by bringing on a new partner who shares our vision and can provide the resources to realize it. We are thrilled to announce that TPG through their Rise Climate Fund along with our two existing investors, CAI and Trilantic, will be making an investment of $750M into Intersect Power.
This is not a project financing or a development loan but a growth equity investment. It is also not an exit, as has been the trend of late, neither management nor current investors are being bought out. This is a doubling down on our team’s audacious vision of rapidly building Intersect Power to be the most scalable, most efficient and most innovative clean infrastructure company in North America.
This investment is also not a flier on a clean technology or a pipeline made of Powerpoint slides. It is rooted in one of the most successful and established development businesses in the industry and our portfolio of fully financed and fully procured assets immune to the near term disruptions and inflationary trends that are roiling our industry.
The funding will allow us to rapidly add to the smartest, funniest, kindest, most innovative and… most humble 😉 team in the business. It will allow us to execute on our pipeline, triple the company’s size and push us into green hydrogen production and other emerging clean energy products over the next five years.
With growth equity investors like TPG and their deep experience in high growth companies and public markets, it is my hope that we will see increasing opportunities for large clean infrastructure companies to participate in these markets. I believe that companies like Intersect Power can not only have a place in public markets, but a responsibility to demonstrate that clean infrastructure can indeed be a growth sector. This is particularly true in a world that is rebuilding its entire economy around low carbon alternatives. The public capital markets represent trillions of dollars of invested capital and capture the attention and imagination of billions of people. It is only with the backing of these markets that we will change the course of the climate crisis.
I have never been more excited about the prospects for Intersect Power than I am today, but capital alone will not be enough. If you are an investor this won’t be the last capital that our growth will require. If you make the things needed to transform our economy – turbines, panels, batteries, electrolyzers – we are ready to build with you. If you are looking to change the world alongside a group of the most talented, most authentic and hardest working people you will ever meet, we look forward to hearing from you.