A leading clean energy finance firm anticipates a wave of consolidation coming for that industry, which it plans to be on deck to profit from. In his first interview since being tapped as CEO of Generate Capital this month, David Crane, formerly a senior official in the Biden administration Energy Department, said that one downside to the clean energy boom unleashed by the Inflation Reduction Act was that a lot of investment poured into project developers “that weren’t quite ready for prime time and didn’t handle scaling up as well as they could have.”
Utility-scale solar, in particular, remains a highly fragmented industry, he said, with the top 20 owner-operators controlling less than half of existing and under-construction assets. A smaller number of larger companies would be better able to function effectively, especially as federal support in the US dries up, he said. And Generate sees a lucrative opportunity in financing industry consolidation, President Bill Sonneborn told Semafor. But Crane downplayed rumors that Generate is heading for its own public offering soon: “IPOs are best done into positive sentiment, and right now the market isn’t craving green stories.”
