238. Revealed: CIP’s Playbook (Live from DLA Piper) - Jul26

**Laurent Segalen** (0:04)
With Laurent Segalen from London and Gerard Reid from Berlin, this is Redefining Energy.

**Laurent Segalen** (0:10)
Today on Redefining Energy, Gerard, we had the privilege of recording live from DLA Piper, our good friends DLA Piper, the law firm, an episode with Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.

**Gerard Reid** (0:24)
Who's one of the biggest investors obviously in the whole renewables era, and they've been at it for a long, long while. It's a good conversation. I think we should just bring them on the show.

**Laurent Segalen** (0:33)
How are you everybody?

**Gerard Reid** (0:34)
How's it going?
I'm Gerard, that's Laurent, this is Rowan. It's really great to be here. And we're gonna talk really about investing in electrical infrastructure, the opportunities and I would say perils as well, because it's not an easy time to be investing. So it's great to be here.

**Laurent Segalen** (0:50)
So we have as guests, Rowan Parkhouse who has accepted to be in the middle. We have a lot of questions pre-prepared, as you can see here, of course, I'm gonna toss.
So that's gonna make the conversation more interesting. And the first question, as you are our guest, is you are managing director at Copenhagen Infrastructure Partner. Imagine I'm an LP, I heard about you, but this first time I meet you. So introduce to me Copenhagen Infrastructure Partner. Thanks, Noura.

**Rowan Parkhouse** (1:22)
Thanks for throwing away my notes.
My IR team will love that.
So yeah, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partner, CIP, we're a fund manager, but we're really an IPP at the same time. And so we're set up as a fund manager. We raise money from our investors and we go and invested in Greenfield Energy Infrastructure. But of the 2,300 people that we have employed, about 75 percent of those are actually construction managers, technology specialists. So we kind of, even though we are a fund manager, really we're a little bit like an IPP platform and we have the kind of delivery engine and the sort of construction and procurement engine of an IPP or a utility. But we're a fund manager, so we have all of the kind of analytical rigor and so on of being a fund manager and all that comes with that. And so Greenfield Energy investing is, to put it simply, investing in projects during development, and then taking them through development, doing all the procurement, the financing, offtake, and then taking them through construction into operations, and then we would invest projects at a certain point in time. And we are primarily a direct project investor. Sometimes we'll buy businesses that also do this, but in the end, what's really important for us is to be close to the assets and try and deliver those assets in a good way. And then technology-wise, we invest across the energy transition. So offshore wind, our heritage actually is coming out of, the senior partners came out of Ørsted, a commercialized offshore wind industry. So we have a big heritage in offshore wind, but we also do a lot of onshore wind, solar batteries, a bit of transmission distribution, so across the range of different technologies.

**Gerard Reid** (2:56)
So maybe we just start through the different technologies, right? Because as you said, you came out of wind.
When I compare the wind and the solar investors, the wind investors for me are always people that, just in terms of mentality, they're different because they take longer, the plans take longer. And if I look at the world that we're in at present, we sort of need people that are really fast, which lends itself to the solar guy, because the solar guy tends to be, they just tend to be quicker in developing the next project. Do you see the same when you're investing? Do you think of it in a different way now or how do you look at it?

**Rowan Parkhouse** (3:27)
Yes. You need to be very thorough as an infrastructure investor because really being a good infrastructure investor for me means that being a little bit neurotic, a little bit attention to detail is extremely important, control is important getting into the weeds because the small chinks in your project, small weaknesses can have a big impact. So you have to be really thorough, which is probably what you're talking about when you're saying wind investors have that sort of mindset. I think solar, you can do a little bit more standardization, you can sort of cookie cutter it a little bit more, so then you can turn the handle a bit faster. I think we try to be agile and sort of understand that there are different ways of doing different things. I don't think anybody can complain about us being too slow. We're definitely sort of being a fund manager kind of brings with it a level of intensity and speed and drive to want to go faster, which naturally means that where there are opportunities to do it, without compromising on the thoroughness that's required, we are trying to move pretty fast.