British International Investment, the UK’s impact investor and development finance institution, today announced the launch of North Star, a $300 million platform created to accelerate the development of renewable power projects in India.
BII said it would commit $150 million, with a further $150 million of private capital provided by the Danish global fund manager Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), through its Growth Markets Fund II (GMF II).
The new platform to be called North Star, is the first investment made through British Climate Partners (BCP), a £1.1 billion climate finance initiative launched by BII last month as part of its new five-year strategy.
BCP is designed to mobilise large‑scale institutional capital into climate solutions across fast-growing and coal-dependent economies in Asia, including India, as well as the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and other South-East Asian countries. It is expected to mobilise £3.5 billion of private capital over the lifetime of its investments, taking the total of its expected commitments over the period to £4.6 billion.
Although renewable energy tenders have expanded rapidly in India, many developers lack the development capacity and capital required to bring projects through to construction and operation. North Star is specifically designed to address these constraints and accelerate projects to scale, while crowding in additional private capital. India is planning to more than triple renewable energy capacity by 2030, but needs to fill a $160 billion per year funding gap to meet that ambition.
North Star will invest across solar, wind and hybrid renewable energy as well as storage projects, which are expected to generate more than 4 million MWh of clean energy annually and avoid about 4 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year.
BII has a proven track record in investing to support India’s green transition. In 2018, BII invested $100m to launch Ayana, a renewable generation platform. The company attracted hundreds of millions of dollars of private capital before being sold last year for an enterprise value of $2.3 billion.
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