New investment aids Exus energy projects

Jim Spencer has done it again. Exus, the renewable energy management firm whose U.S. operations Mr. Spencer runs out of the Energy Innovation Center in the Hill District, is being majority acquired by a Swiss private equity firm that promises to balloon its presence.

Mr. Spencer, who once helmed

EverPower Wind Holdings, went through something similar when the London-based private equity firm Terra Firma Capital Partners took a controlling interest in the Pittsburgh-based wind developer in 2009. Eight years later, private equity giant BlackRock bought EverPower’s seven operating wind farms, four of them in Pennsylvania.

EverPower’s former CEO pondered his next move.

He ended up opening the U.S. division of Exus Management Partners, a Spanish firm that focused on a different mission. Instead of developing and running its own renewable energy projects, Exus helped interested investors acquire them and then manage those assets for the investors, many of which were European utilities.

Now, with Switzerland-based Partners Group making its investment in Exus, Mr. Spencer will get to reprise his old role of buildings things from the ground up.

Partners said it will spend $1 billion to grow Exus into a project developer and owner, with the goal of cooking up projects exceeding 1 gigawatt of capacity each year. It will also still manage assets for others, the company said.

Partners has set its sights on large, utility-scale renewable energy projects, Mr. Spencer said.

“It’s part of the entire [energy] transition,” he said. “They see decarbonization pushing forward.”

To demonstrate the opportunity that exists, he rattled off a slew of Pennsylvania coal plants that have either closed or are scheduled to close in the next few years, leaving a generation void and lots of useful electrical infrastructure in their place.

The specific renewable technologies that interest him are varied, Mr. Spencer said.

“But we’re putting a lot of emphasis on storage.”

It’s something he has been thinking about — and waiting to arrive — for at least a decade.

In a 2014 interview with the Post-Gazette, Mr. Spencer named battery storage as a technology to watch, saying it needs to be more costeffective but would be critical in making renewables bigger players on the grid.

“Once a long-term federal renewable energy policy is implemented, battery producers will have incentive to make batteries less expensive than they currently are,” he said at the time.

No such long-term federal energy policy has materialized, but what stands in for that is the Inflation Reduction Act, which gives billions of dollars in incentives to renewable energy and battery storage projects, as well as tax incentives for domestic battery manufacturing.

In its announcement of the deal on Wednesday, Partners cited the trends it sees lifting Exus in its new role, “including growing regulatory support for renewables, geopolitical uncertainty driving wind and solar deployment, and rising demand from corporates to offset carbon footprints as part of decarbonization goals.”

Exus’ U.S. headquarters will remain in Pittsburgh — “our investors love the location,” Mr. Spencer said — and will likely double in size over the next three years. His current complement is about 50 employees.

The price of the acquisition, which is gives Partners a majority interest, was not disclosed publicly.