New York-based Brookfield Asset Management and its institutional partners have signed a deal to buy National Grid’s onshore renewable power business for US$1.74 billion, just days after Brookfield said it was on the lookout for bargains after Donald Trump’s scorched earth hostility to solar and wind triggered a market panic among investors.
The news broke just as analysts at the non-profit Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) traced the firm’s continuing investments in fossil fuel assets.
“It is encouraging to see that Brookfield appears interested in investing in the clean energy transition,” the Chicago-based organization wrote. “Investors should ask Brookfield to also clean up the rest of the firm’s portfolio, retiring polluting fossil fuel assets and accurately reporting emissions to allow investors to accurately gauge the climate risk and accompanying financial risk of investing with Brookfield.”National Grid Renewables builds, owns, and operates utility-scale, solar, onshore wind, and battery storage projects in the United States, The Canadian Press reports, with 1.8 gigawatts in operation and 1.3 gigawatts under construction. National Grid expects the deal will close in the first half of the financial year ending March 31, 2026.
With US$126 billion in renewable energy and lower-carbon investments already under management, Brookfield is “actively looking for big listed sustainable energy producers to buy,” the Financial Times reported last week, citing remarks by company president Connor Teskey.
“With the current position of the public markets we’re certainly monitoring a few things,” Teskey told the Times, pointing to a “very large” difference between the public and private market valuations for some publicly-traded renewable energy firms. The news story identifies First Solar, Vestas Wind Systems, and XPLR Infrastructure as renewable firms that have seen sharp drops in share value since the U.S. presidential election last November.
Now, Teskey’s comments “are a vote of confidence in a sector that has been hit by Trump’s sweeping cuts to green energy initiatives, as the new president moves to dismantle his predecessor Joe Biden’s climate and industrial legacy,” the Times states.
With a wave of data centre development on the horizon, Teskey said Trump’s determination to boost oil and gas production and eviscerate funding programs for renewables won’t shift Brookfield’s focus on affordable, renewably-generated electricity. “The scale of the demand growth requires companies to use any and all types of power generation solutions,” he told the Times. “Renewables are going to benefit from that and will play a leading role because of their low-cost position.”
In its assessment of Brookfield’s wider portfolio, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project traced Teskey’s recent statements about clean energy investment, noting that the firm is “actively fundraising around the energy transition” and stands as “one of the largest owners in the renewable power space.” But Brookfield still received only a D rating in the 2024 Private Equity Climate Risks (PECR) Scorecard, based on the 26 fossil companies in which it has a stake through its majority ownership of Oaktree Capital Management, a global asset management firm headquartered in LA.
Brookfield also spent US$7 billion in 2020 to buy a 42% stake in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Louisiana co-owned Cheniere Energy, the biggest LNG producer in the U.S., a company with senior Democratic Party connections dating back to the Obama administration. “Unless the firm takes action to retire these fossil fuel assets, Brookfield would appear on track to still own and operate a large amount of fossil fuel infrastructure in 2050,” PESP wrote, despite its commitment to hit net-zero by 2050.
The PESP report also pointed to a dramatic difference between the nine million tonnes of Scope 1 and 2 emissions that Brookfield reported in 2023 for “controlled portfolio companies” and the 211 million tonnes across the Brookfield and Oaktree portfolios that year. “Brookfield’s double standards underscore the need for private equity firms to commit to a fossil-free portfolio sooner, rather than by 2050, which is nearly a generation away,” the analysis stated.
In its Electricity 2025 report published earlier this month, the International Energy Agency projected that solar, wind, and hydropower will meet 95% of new electricity demand over the next three years, even as consumption grows at a torrid pace of 3.9% per year.
Portions of this report were published by The Canadian Press on Feb. 24, 2025.
