Climate Investment Newsletter 7/4 - 7/10

Individual Deals and Market Watch

Electric vehicle battery maker Northvolt announced a $1.1 billion funding boost, with a range of investors — including Volkswagen and Goldman Sachs Asset Management — taking part in the capital raise.

Intersect is a utility-scale solar developer-owner with about 2.2 gigawatts of projects in its portfolio. Its model is based around higher-return, short-term contracts and domestic solar supplies.

Xpansiv connects buyers and sellers of environmental commodities and provides market data for voluntary carbon offsets, renewable energy credits (RECs), and low-carbon fuels, each of which are critical elements of global decarbonization. Xpansiv’s growing ecosystem supports companies seeking to meet environmental and emissions reduction goals.

Hanwha Energy USA Holdings Corporation announced its issuance of US$300 million 4.125% Senior Green Bonds due 2025, guaranteed by Export-Import Bank of Korea. The offering was conducted in reliance on Rule 144A and Regulation S of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended.

South Korea's leading chemicals maker LG Chem Ltd. said it has issued global green bonds worth $300 million to help bolster the competitiveness of its battery materials business and finance more investments in eco-friendly businesses.

UAE-based sustainable, tech-driven agribusiness Pure Harvest Smart Farms (Pure Harvest) continues to be the one of the best-funded startups in the MEASA (Middle East, Africa, and South Asia) region, announcing it has secured $180.5 million through its latest growth funding round to bring total funding to-date to $387.1 million.

Climentum Capital is launching a €150m (£128.45m) fund to invest in 25 startups across Europe that are developing technologies that “drastically” cut CO2 emissions.

Germany’s Green Generation Fund landed more capital to invest in alt-protein startups,

Macro Commitments

National Grid Plc has laid out plans for a £54 billion upgrade to the electricity grid, the biggest investment since the 1950s, to connect up its growing fleet of offshore wind farms.

Germany is planning to spend about EUR 3.6 billion (USD 3.75bn) to support international partnerships in the area of green hydrogen as the country will need to import significant volumes of the clean fuel to decarbonise its industry and accelerate the energy transition.

For Gabon, forests are rich in with economic opportunity. The country plans to create 187 million carbon credits and sell half of them on the offset market.

The EU funding will support project development until 2027, including the development of a fish farm in Ogun state in southwestern Nigeria and a waste-to-energy initiative in Cross River, south of Nigeria.

The factory will be designed to operate as a carbon-neutral facility, and 100% of its day-to-day energy needs will be matched by renewable energy generated by an onsite solar park. The site will also be designed to minimize energy consumption and use of non-renewable resources.

A $200 million loan was granted to Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC), an industrial soy and corn producer, for monoculture work in Brazil’s Cerrado, a grassland biome that has lost nearly 80% of its habitat cover.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Government of the United Kingdom (UK) have signed a memorandum of understanding to develop a £107 million (around $134 million) trust fund to support efforts by Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries to scale up green financing and shift to low-emission, climate-resilient development.

Pathways, Frameworks, Case Studies, Research, Climate Science

The ECB said the estimate in its first climate stress test significantly understated actual losses for the 41 banks in the sample because it focused only on credit and market risk and did not take account of indirect effects such as an economic downturn.

The report includes Competitive Quadrant, a proprietary tool to analyze and evaluate the position of companies based on their Industry Position score and Market Performance score. The tool uses various factors for categorizing the players into four categories. Some of these factors considered for analysis are financial performance over the last 3 years, growth strategies, innovation score, new product launches, investments, growth in market share, etc.

The new market report (395 pages, 305 tables & figures) published by HSRC, Carbon & Methane Capture Market & Technologies – 2022-2030 – With Corona & COP26 Impacts, concludes that the 2022–2030 market growth is driven by the following factors

What’s new in climate investment?