Friday 22 May 2020
‘Post-coronavirus, businesses will increasingly seek outside assistance to finance clean heat projects’
In the post-coronavirus era, big business will increasingly seek the aid of professional firms to help finance heat decarbonisation projects, rather than funding them themselves.
That's the suggestion from Richard Burrell, CEO of AMP Clean Energy, who spoke to future Net Zero about the UK's journey to net zero and what he thinks will happen next.
He noted that although in the short term there is likely to be disruption to financing, this will likely be on the timescale of weeks rather than months.
He told future Net Zero Founder Sumit Bose that in terms of heat decarbonisation projects, one challenge frequently faced before the coronavirus crisis was that even when large corporates were shown how best to decarbonise their heat, they often chose to source the money needed out of their own CapEx budgets.
Mr Burrell stated these organisations are now realising they need to save cash and that in many cases, they can't finance their own heat decarbonisation projects - he suggested they are now becoming increasingly aware of a need to turn to specialist financiers to assist them.
When asked as to whether he saw an opportunity developing, Mr Burrell said: "I absolutely see an opportunity and I can point to that by a look at our pipeline - we've had two or three projects which had effectively been stalled because we were not going to finance them, the companies or the corporates were going to finance them themselves.
"They are now not financing them themselves and have come back to us and said, 'actually can you help and can you do this', and as long as we can get the capital to do it and we are the specialists in doing this, then I think the opportunity is quite significant."
He added that in terms of getting the capital, there is still 'enormous interest' from insurance companies, pension funds and similar organisations to invest in clean energy technology and assets and said he was 'very positive' for what the future would bring.
