Investment Outlook 2024: Infrastructure Equity

The decarbonisation agenda for investors in Europe is well established. The UK’s offshore wind market is one of the largest in the world, while for southern European countries – taking advantage of their climate - solar is key. The need to decarbonise the environment and hit net zero targets is deeply ingrained with European investors, both from a regulatory standpoint and in line with their fiduciary duties.

The US, on the other hand, has lagged in the transition from fossil fuels, particularly with respect to the deployment of renewables. But that’s changing. The cost of US wind and solar power is now competitive with fossil fuels, and as the cost falls it is driving a lot of activity.

Energy security and affordability is another major theme, turbo charged by political circumstances and incentivising renewable build-out within home markets. That too, will drive lots of opportunity.

This wider societal need has occurred at the same time as investors have discovered the value that an allocation to renewables can play in a portfolio, with the inflation protection and energy price exposure they provide being especially compelling qualities in the current environment. Importantly, the strong diversification benefit of renewable infrastructure displayed over a difficult period for wider financial markets over the last couple of years is typical of what we would expect.

So where exactly are the opportunities?

The investment opportunity has been described as the biggest since the Industrial Revolution.

While the current rate of investment is encouraging for the push to meet net zero targets by 2050, but reaching net zero is still going to be a massive challenge. The amounts that need to be invested is significant to put it mildly. An estimated $3 trillion need to be invested per annum into energy transition technology by 2050.

In the near term, the biggest opportunities will continue to be in the more traditional sectors of wind and solar. But as we progress further along the road of decarbonising the economy, we expect to move to harder-to-abate sectors like the steel and cement industries, chemical production, air and marine transport and heating. Longer-term, hydrogen has a massive role to play here. It is a small market today, but in the 2030s and onwards, hydrogen as a sector needs to be the size of the offshore wind market.

In the US a lot of battery storage will come online in the near-term, spurred on in part by the US Inflation Reduction Act. We expect that to continue. Offshore wind in the US as a market is not yet up and running, although numerous projects are in the pipeline. Like Europe, newer technologies like hydrogen and carbon capture will come to the fore. This is a rich seam of investment opportunities that we believe investors will be mining for five years or more.

The tailwinds for renewable infrastructure are therefore strong, but like any sector in infrastructure there are going to be challenges to overcome – supply chain for example. However, energy transition infrastructure strategies continue to see strong interest from a rising number of investors who recognise the need and suitability to today’s challenging market backdrop, decarbonisation of their portfolios and the wider economy.