Armin Sandhoevel, the chief investment officer for infrastructure equity at Allianz Global Investors, on the four ways renewable power can empower both investors and users...
1) It’s our future: Renewable energy is a great tool to fight climate change. The Paris agreement and the recent COP22 summit have taken decisive steps on the path to a sustainable future. Such investments contribute to a larger dialog.
2) It’s an attractive option: In this low interest rate environment, institutional investors such as insurers or pension funds stand to benefit from the combination of regular payments, good returns and diversification over a 25-year period.
3) It’s a promising market: Wind and solar plants have been planned and developed on a large scale, and are now established, across Europe. Against this backdrop, the secondary market for existing plants is becoming more and more important and there are some very promising acquisition opportunities in Germany, France, Great Britain and Scandinavia.
4) It builds infrastructure: AREF investors play a key role in the generation of environment-friendly electricity that is sufficient to power roughly 450,000 two-person households - a city equivalent in population size to the Swedish capital Stockholm – for an entire year. Think about what that means for the world.