Boulder-based Vision Ridge Partners LLC, a private-equity firm focused on climate change, and Capricorn Investment Group, the money manager for former EBay Inc. president Jeffrey Skoll, have started a $430 million fund to invest in renewable power and other sustainability projects.
The Sustainable Asset Fund is among the largest private financing vehicles dedicated to such ventures and is seeking to draw on momentum from last year’s international climate deal in Paris, the companies said in a statement Friday.
“There’s a huge opportunity in a dynamic and changing market,” said Reuben Munger, managing partner at Vision Ridge. “What we’ve seen, and what some of our key investors have seen, is that there’s actually a great opportunity to make money off of this transition.”
Almost 200 countries agreed in Paris to rein in fossil-fuel emissions blamed for skewing the world’s climate. That’s expected to require a shift around the globe away from oil, coal and natural gas and toward lower-polluting technologies like solar and electric cars, at a potential cost of trillions of dollars over the coming decades.
Vision Ridge is partnering with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Capricorn and the Boston-based Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.
The fund has already invested in a company that finances energy-efficiency upgrades; a provider of electric-vehicle fleets; and solar projects in Massachusetts, Florida, California and Japan, according to the statement.
Its focus is on companies that are ready to go to market but might face problems raising money because of a unique location, financing structure or technology, such as a new kind of wind turbine, said Ion Yadigaroglu, Capricorn’s managing director.
“It’s not designed for your generic renewable infrastructure,” he said in an interview. “We don’t want it to go into areas that others are already into. We want it to be impactful.”
