Australian superannuation fund Rest will invest $1 billion with renewable and clean energy infrastructure manager Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners to support the energy transition.
This commitment will go towards a range of assets — such as solar and battery projects and green data storage centres — including Quinbrook’s Supernode green data campus in Brisbane.
Quinbrook has raised and now manages multiple value-add funds across diverse energy transition thematics for many of the world’s leading institutions.
The company is led and managed by a senior team of power industry professionals who have collectively invested more than US$8.2 billion in energy infrastructure assets since the early 1990s, representing more than 19.5 gigawatts of power supply capacity.
Quinbrook’s investment focus includes:
- Solar energy plus storage: the creation, storage and distribution at scale of solar energy, including the construction of the largest solar and storage project in US history.
- Green data centres: maximising the energy efficiency and minimising the environmental impact of large-scale data repositories.
- Renewables for energy intensive industries: supporting the rapid decarbonisation of energy intensive industrials.
- Distributed energy solutions: investing in a diverse portfolio, including grid support infrastructure to enable the renewables build-out.
- Opportunistic acquisitions from the disruptive impacts of the energy transition
Rest Chief Investment Officer Andrew Lill said sustainable digitisation is key to allowing the rapid transformation and connectivity of the global economy to continue in an energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly manner.
“In a world increasingly reliant on data, and through the global growth in cloud-based technologies and AI, data centres have become big business and demand for this critical infrastructure is expected to accelerate.
“Repositories for the storage, management and dissemination of data require significant investments and huge amounts of energy.
“Maximising their energy efficiency and minimising their environmental impact through our commitment to Quinbrook is just one way we believe we can contribute to strong long-term financial benefits for Rest members, while supporting our objective to achieve a net zero carbon footprint for the fund by 2050,” said Lill.
