Ansarada has supported dealmakers across the energy transition for two decades, spanning generation, storage, grid and transmission assets.
In December 2024, Blackstone and Canada Pension Plan Investments closed on AirTrunk for an implied enterprise value of A$24 billion (US$16.1 billion), the largest data centre transaction in history. Fourteen months later, a Belgian developer called Storm closed a €330 million financing for two battery parks that will never generate a single watt of new clean power. They exist purely to hold power steady on a grid that's already struggling to keep up.
Those two deals, on opposite sides of the planet, are describing the same shift. I track energy dealflow for a living, and the pattern across the last eighteen months is unmistakable: capital has stopped chasing generation and started chasing delivery.
The old story and the new one
For most of the last decade, an energy transition deal meant one thing: fund the wind farm, fund the solar park, count the megawatts. Generation was the asset. Everything else was plumbing.
That's no longer where the money is concentrated. Look at what actually closed in the last eighteen months, across Belgium, Spain, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and four other things show up far more often than a new turbine:
Firm offtake. ib vogt sold its 95.18MWp Baobab Solar project in Segovia, Spain in late 2025 on the strength of a 15-year power purchase agreement with Equinix, a data centre operator, not a utility. In Australia, Telstra signed on for half the output of the Glenellen solar farm (210GWh a year), and BHP locked in a seven-year renewable PPA with CleanCo to run its BMA steelmaking coal operations on clean power from 2027. Generation is increasingly built to a specific buyer's contract, not sold on the open market afterward.
Storage as grid infrastructure, not generation. Storm's €330 million financing built two battery parks, 200MW/800MWh at Ruien and 100MW/400MWh at Langerlo, backed by a syndicate of infrastructure funds and seven banks. Their job isn't to add clean electrons. It's to stop a grid buckling under new demand from doing so.
Grid connections as the M&A target. In the UK, Grant Thornton advised high-voltage grid services firm RJ Power Networks on its sale to Ipsum, a 1,000-person utilities infrastructure platform. In New Zealand, Igneo Infrastructure Partners sold the Clarus energy group, including the Firstlight electricity distribution network, to Brookfield and Powerco for roughly NZ$2 billion, with RBC Capital Markets advising on the sell side. Private capital is now paying directly for the physical ability to connect things to the grid.
Capital formation catching up to all of it. EnergyVision's €42.3 million IPO on Euronext Brussels bundled solar generation with EV charging infrastructure in one listing. ACEN Australia raised AUD750 million in portfolio debt financing, advised by Macquarie Capital and Morgan Stanley, to fund a 13GW pipeline of wind, solar, pumped hydro and storage. RenewCo Power raised growth capital from the Scottish National Investment Bank and SSE, advised by Marathon Capital, spanning wind, solar, storage and green hydrogen in the same raise. Public and private markets are pricing the whole bundle, not just the turbine.
What's driving it
AI is not the only reason grids are under pressure, electrification of transport, heating and heavy industry all play a part. But it's the accelerant. Blackstone's own team has said data centre demand has grown roughly 17-fold since 2019, and a single AI prompt can require exponentially more compute, and therefore more power, than a standard search query. AirTrunk alone has more than 800MW of capacity already committed to customers and land banked for over a gigawatt more.
Grids were not built for this. The UK's National Energy System Operator had a connections queue of more than 700GW, roughly four times what the country needs to hit its 2030 clean power target, before a 2025 reform cleared it down to a prioritised pipeline of 381.5GW. The UK government has said plainly that grid connections are now the single biggest blocker to building AI-capable data centres on British soil. In Belgium, Elia and Fluvius point to data centres, battery parks and industrial electrification, not a shortage of electricity itself, as the direct cause of local grid congestion, and had to relax connection rules this year just to unlock 760 pending applications. In Australia, developers describe a "land grab" for sites with usable grid connections, the same scarcity, a different accent.
The term I'd use
Call it the demand-and-delivery era of the energy transition, as distinct from the generation era that preceded it. The defining question for a deal is no longer "how many megawatts." It's "who has firm claim on the power, who's storing it, who's connecting it, and who can see how it's being used." Four separate questions, four separate categories of deal, all happening at once.
This series will take each one in turn: what a firm power PPA actually is and why data centre operators are writing them; why battery storage graduated from optional to load-bearing infrastructure almost overnight; why a private equity firm would buy a company whose only product is a grid connection; and why a Swiss metering company's quiet two-acquisition roll-up might matter more than any single wind farm.
The generation era asked one question. This one asks four. That's a harder deal to run, and a harder set of counterparties, contracts and data to keep straight, which is exactly why it's worth understanding properly before the next one lands on your desk.
Start your energy deal for free
