Macquarie Acquires Ziton, Octopus Energy Enters US Market

This week on News Flash, the hosts discuss Macquarie Asset Management's acquisition of Ziton, a Denmark based provider of operations and maintenance services to the offshore industry. Also, Octopus Energy solidifies its entry into the US renewables market with an investment to create 600 megawatts of new solar farms in the U. S. And Berkshire Hathaway consolidates their company operations, opening the door for more renewable projects. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I'm here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, Joel Saxum. And this Is your newsflash news flashes brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at IntelStor. com Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway energy, the second largest us clean power owner will pay about 3. 9 billion for the minority 8 percent stake held by the family of late board member, Walter Scott. The deal involves 2. 37 billion in cash. The exchange of Berkshire Class B shares for 1. 6 billion BHE shares and issuance of a 600 million one year note. As of January 1st, Berkshire Hathaway Energy owned about 14 gigawatts of clean energy capacity, including 12 gigawatts of wind. And roughly 2 gigawatts of solar and storage. Now, Phil, Berkshire Hathaway Energy has been consolidating operations over the last 6 to 12 months. Is this part of that larger plan to consolidate? Philip Totaro: It sounds like it although this is also obviously a bit of a legacy thing with taking over the stake held by, by Scott's family and presumably in some kind of a trust or something. Like. It's giving Berkshire Hathaway Energy the opportunity, as you mentioned, to just consolidate the, the company's ownership and consolidate the brands under the Berkshire Hathaway Energy umbrella, which theoretically gives them more power. Bandwidth and more capacity to keep borrowing if they need to borrow to go, build out the pipeline of renewable energy projects that they've got. So one thing that we've talked about recently on the show is the fact that there's a lot of investment funds and firms coming into the renewable sector. What they bring with them is capital, or the ability to go leverage the, the capital base that they've got to go borrow money. So for your big utility company owner operators, they want to be able to do a similar thing. And this is going to help kind of bolster the, the company's ability to, to do that. Joel Saxum: Yeah. It's the same thing. Like Phil saying, we've talked about on the show before Berkshire Hathaway backed Warren Buffett, big money is following the same concept as you're seeing with a lot of other big money groups, Vanguard, BlackRock, all these different and, and of course, pension funds and whatnot of putting their capital Into energy infrastructure world, right? So they're helping build up the energy transition, but that's because they see it as good business. So when you see big money coming into a certain sector, you can bet it's going to be around a while and they're betting banking on success. UK Allen Hall: based Octopus Energy has made two new investments in the U. S. green energy market. Following its initial entry just three months ago with solar farm acquisitions in Ohio and Pe...