KKR has launched Virescent Infrastructure, a newly created platform, to acquire renewable energy assets in India.
The global investor, KKR has been investing in India since 2006, will use the platform to expand its portfolio of operational renewable energy assets, facilitated by investments predominantly made through KKR’s infrastructure fund.
Mumbai-headquartered Virescent currently owns 317MWp of solar assets in the Indian states of Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.
KKR has also entered agreements to acquire other operating solar projects across three different Indian states for the Virescent platform.
Sanjay Grewal, Virescent’s CEO spoke of “positive” government initiatives, which, he said, had created a number of long-term investment opportunities in India’s rapidly-transforming renewable energy sector.
“Virescent will seek to invest in many of these great opportunities, in addition to achieving stable returns by acquiring high-quality, low-risk, and income- yielding assets with stable and long-term cashflows,“ he said.
Hardik Shah, a managing director on KKR’s Infrastructure team, said, the launch of Virescent was a meaningful milestone for KKR’s Asia-Pacific infrastructure strategy amid India’s ambitions to install 175GW of renewable energy capacity by 2022, and 450GW by 2030.
By 2030, renewable energy is estimated to comprise approximately 60% of India’s installed power capacity from around 24% at present.
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