This week, renewable energy asset manager AVG Group Sarl announced that it has made a strategic investment in Norway’s Greenstat, the Bergen-based renewables developer that emerged from one of the country’s leading innovation think-tanks, the Norwegian Research Center (NORCE) and is today focused largely on the advancement of hydrogen fuel. While the dollar amount of the investment was not publicly disclosed, AVG Group Sarl said that the stake will enable Greenstat to expand into global markets–notably the U.S.–while providing AVG with priority deal flow in renewable energy projects in those markets.
Earlier this year, Aker Clean Hydrogen (ACH)–a division of Norwegian energy and industrial giant Aker Kvaerner–paid NOK 60.5 million (about $6.8 million) for a 23 percent stake in GreenStat, to become the company’s single-largest shareholder as it prepares for an eventual listing on the Euronext Growth Exchange.
“The industrialization of clean hydrogen starts now,” Aker Clean Hydrogen CEO Knut Nyborg said at the time that deal was signed. “We are excited about the opportunity to unlock the hydrogen economy together with and as a strategic owner of Greenstat. Together we will work to create green value chains.”
While it appears that Greenstat and Aker would like some of those green value chains to come together in the U.S. market, Greenstat is also making significant investments further afield–specifically in India, where its subsidiaries Greenstat Asia and Greenstat Hydrogen India have entered into agreements with various Indian companies and put together several consortia participating in tenders for planned hydrogen demo and pilot-projects in India.
U.S. feeder fund
The deal with Greenstat marks the latest in a string of strategic investments for AVG Group Sarl, which is headquartered, in New York, Oslo and Luxembourg. Last month, AVG made a strategic investment of NOK 17 million (about $2 million) in Norhybrid, a Norwegian maker of modular wind turbines to complement or replace existing solar infrastructure. AVGs investment was backed by SIVA, the Norwegian government’s Industrial Development Fund.
Concurrent with that investment, AVG announced that it has established a U.S.-based feeder fund, the “Nordic ESG and Impact Fund LLC,” an investment vehicle open to North American investors, in partnership with U.S. broker-dealer Silver Leaf Partners, LLC.
