Blackstone has announced the final close of its Blackstone Energy Transition Partners V at $8.7 billion, 50 percent higher than the previous interaction. That number says more than any press release.
The oversubscribed fund seeks to support energy companies that deliver low-carbon energy at scale.
BETP V commenced its investment period in June and has already funded three platform companies, including independent power producer Kindle Energy, Spanish energy transition firm Fisterra, and private electric transmission utility Viridon. The fund has also acquired three companies that focus on energy efficiency and resiliency, including Flow Control, a US provider of flow control solutions and components for data center liquid cooling. My read is that the fund is moving beyond generation into the hardware and services that keep data centers cool and connected.
Blackstone also announced a $5.34bn investment into US natural gas firm Williams to fund the development of five behind-the-meter projects to meet growing power demand from the data center market in North America. Easy to announce, harder to underwrite.
In September, it was reported that Blackstone’s data center joint venture with Google was hit with delays. The joint venture, known internally as Project Braid, was formed in May of this year and saw Google and Blackstone planning to launch a new cloud platform offering Google's Tensor Processing Units.