Investors are very keen to employ capital, from private equity to all levels of debt, in energy infrastructure as the sector transitions to a green economy, says Fransen, who has worked on financing solar and wind projects in the past few years. It’s not only Hydro One in Ontario that has used its lines to transmit electricity generated by wind and solar; other companies have also gotten into it, he says. “Greening the grid” and moving to a carbon economy, including carbon storage and capture technologies, has a lot of private sector interest as well as being supported by the CIB.
Although hospitals, roads and other social infrastructure are still being built, focus has shifted “to the infrastructure that supports … the country’s climate objectives and other environmental objectives,” Fransen adds. “There seems to be a lot of capital being deployed [there] in the last year or so.”
Indigenous infrastructure and ownership
Greening the grid has dovetailed with the interests of First Nations, who are increasingly taking significant ownership stakes in infrastructure projects.
A number of First Nations and northern Ontario communities have a 20-per-cent stake, Fransen says, in the East-West Tie Transmission Project: an approximately 450-kilometer, double-circuit, 230-kilovolt transmission line from the Wawa Transformer Station to the Lakehead Transformer Station near Thunder Bay. Its proponent is NextBridge Infrastructure LP.
Further south in Ontario, the Oneida Energy Storage project is a joint venture between NRStor Inc. and Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation to develop a 250 megawatt/1000 megawatt-hour energy storage facility.
