This week we were pleased to participate in Infocast’s Renewable Energy Asset Management Conference in Carlsbad, CA. Jason Kaminsky, our Vice President of Partnerships, moderated a panel entitled Ownership Strategies for the New Breed of Investors. The panelists included Ty Bowman of Prudential Capital Group, Bill Cannon of Sumitomo, Andrew Kim from Goldman Sachs, Lisa Ryder of KeyBanc Capital Markets, and Mark Williams of PNC Bank.
In what proved to be a rousing discussion, the participants discussed their roles and requirements as investors in renewable energy. A few highlights from the panel include:
All panelists agreed that compliance obligations are ratcheting up for investors, and that internal oversight requires timely, accurate, and consistent reports. Compliance comes from all sides, including senior management, internal audit, credit, the OCC, the Fed, etc. One panelist shared that when a partner delivers reports at “5pm on the last day of the quarter”, it makes her job more difficult and lowers the desire to work with those specific partners in the future.
Ty Bowman of Prudential reinforced the idea that transparency is critical to the investor-borrower relationship. The investor community wants to help solve problems together with their partners, and investors often have seen things in their other portfolios that can help address problems that a different client may be seeing. Open communication and data sharing are often mutually beneficial.
Andrew Kim of Goldman Sachs stated that he doesn’t like the phrase “passive investor” and views his role as one of “active oversight.” This phrase really resonated with us, as it highlights the obligation that investors have to stay close to their investments, even if they’re not the day-to-day managers. Active oversight is one step beyond trust-but-verify, with frequent portfolio surveillance and engagement in the operation of the portfolio.
A number of the investors from the utility-scale market shared that commercial and industrial DG scare them from an asset management perspective due to the quantity of projects and the difficulty of underwriting / monitoring performance. The panelists agreed that you need strategic partners for asset management as the quantity of assets in the portfolio grows.
We’d like to thank Infocast for inviting us to participate in the conference. Thanks as well to Mark Williams of PNC, who gave us a shout-out for helping PNC with their asset management obligations through our HelioStats software platform.