Constellation Acquires Calpine, Waaree Acquires Enel India

Waaree Energies will acquire 100% of Enel Green Power India for $95 million. BHE US Transmission will acquire 10% of the North Plains Connector Transmission Project from Grid United. And Constellation has announced it will acquire Calpine in a cash and stock transaction valued at $16. 4 billion.

Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news lightning fast. Your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, and Phil Totaro discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by Intel Store. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www. intelstore. com.

Allen Hall: Waaree Energies has signed a share purchase agreement to acquire 100 percent of Enel Green Power India for 95 million. The acquisition includes their portfolio of approximately 640 megawatts AC and 760 megawatts of DC operational solar and wind energy projects across India with additional projects under development.

The transaction will help Waaree diversify revenue streams and enhance wind project execution capabilities. Phil, my first question about this is why is Enel Green Power leaving India?

Phil Totaro: Well, it’s actually a really fascinating question that I’ve been getting over the past week or so since the announcement came out and it, it, basically has to do with Enel wanting to consolidate more operations in Europe effectively, as well as reinvest in other emerging markets that they find more promising.

Now, we’ve talked before on the show about how India’s growth market but it’s also still a challenging market if you’re not a, you know, kind of Indian based company or, you know, have a strong presence in that market. Enel had, you know, a reasonably sized portfolio for the size of the market overall.

And divesting it is really just about that cash and being able to redeploy it in markets like Chile or you know, even in Spain or Italy on on projects that are either, you know, repowering or, or new greenfield development. So You know, what’s happening in India effectively is that a lot of Western companies that were pioneers in project development or manufacturing in the market are pulling back a little bit and selling off their asset portfolio to Indian concerns.

So the Indian market’s becoming firmly much more Indian.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, and that fits with that rhetoric there. If you’ve dealt with Enel, they like to do their operations out of Italy. So they want things a little bit closer to home. And that’s been a ongoing trend with them. The interesting thing about Wari Energies here as well, as Phil said, they are very much an Indian company.

They’re a Fortune 500 company in India. And they’re India’s largest, a subsidiary of the Watery Group and Watery Energies is the largest photovoltaic panel producer in India. So they’re building a lot of solar as an OEM, and also now bolstering their portfolio of Solar projects and getting more into the wind side of things.

So bigger play from Wari Energies over in India.

Allen Hall: And in the states here, BHE US Transmission has signed a memorandum of understanding with Grid United to acquire 10 percent of the 3, 000 megawatt North Plains Connector Transmission Project. Now that project involves building a 420 mile high voltage DC transmission line connecting the U.

S. eastern and western electrical grids in North Dakota and Montana. It’s a 3. 2 billion dollar project and it’s entering the permitting phase with approval is expected in 2026 and operation planned in 2032. Phil, as the U. S. grid starts to connect itself a little more this BHE U. S. transmission agreement is one of several, I think, that are going to happen in the next couple of years.

Phil Totaro: Yes, and it’s indicative of the fact that, you know, some of the companies that were developing these high voltage DC transmission projects that are crossing multiple states. You know, first of all, they had, they were much smaller concerns. They had trouble getting access to capital and they had trouble getting right of way permits and other things to be able to actually build these projects.

Once Grid United actually got this project mature enough. It certainly attracted the interest, obviously, of BHE. But this is no different than, you know, some of the other projects that have seen interest from Invenergy, who bought into an HVDC line a couple years ago. And it’s, it’s, Part of the, the necessity of renewable energy to have this kind of transmission capacity so that we can move the power from, you know, where we’ve got the, the wind and solar resource over to load centers, which are typically, you know, taking power from the middle of the country and moving it out towards the coasts.

Joel Saxum: This. This article really excites me. I’m super, I’m super excited for this project to go because, and this is, HVDC is something that we talk about on the show, Alan and I talk about it off the show quite often. Why don’t we build more HVDC? Why don’t we build more HVDC? And now we have some big players.

BHE, so you know, BHE U. S. Transmission, Berkshire Hathaway Energy. So that is a Warren Buffett backed entity as are, you know, some other huge companies and portfolio companies within their group. So you have big players putting real money into projects like this. And sometimes when you have a project that’s, you know, HVDC is not groundbreaking, but it’s still kind of new in the space to be putting on land specifically in the United States.

This project builds to the fleet of these projects are being done. However, this one is North Dakota and Montana. If you know anything about North Dakota and Montana, it’s pretty easy to build big infrastructure projects across the plains up there. So you kind of have a softball across the plate. Large.

HVDC 420 miles across what’s basically a lot of farmland and rangeland. This project should go off without a hitch or with minimal hitches. I’m not going to say without a hitch, with minimal hitches in construction. And it will be, it has the possibility of really sparking some more of these HVDC developments here in the United States.

So like I said, I’m excited for this one.

Allen Hall: And big news in renewable energy solutions. Constellation has announced it will acquire Calpine in a cash and stock transaction valued at 16. 4 billion, consisting of 50 million shares of Constellation stock and 4. 5 billion in cash, plus assuming 12. 7 billion in Calpine debt.

Now, this merger creates America’s largest clean energy provider, combining Constellation’s nuclear fleet with Calpine’s natural gas and geothermal operations. Phil, when we talk about size of energy companies in the United States, this is actually not that big when you compare it to an Exxon Mobil or a ConocoPhillips, right?

Phil Totaro: Correct. And it’s an interesting thing because, you know, between Constellation and Calpine, their wind and solar portfolio isn’t huge, but they’re lumping things like nuclear and other technologies into this clean energy definition that they have. So we can have a debate about that later, but the, the reality of it is it’s a, it’s a big merger and it’s an important one because it also, you know, Constellation Was very excited about renewables there for a while, then backed off and now it feels like they’re getting excited about, you know, renewables again with with this kind of a deal.

So, like I said, I mean, the, the portfolio that they have of wind and solar projects is an enormous combined. It’s, you know, about I want to say a little under 2 gigawatts of wind and, and just over 1 gigawatt worth of solar. But they’re, they’re able to take the enormous balance sheet that, that Constellation has and that Calpine combined with it provides and leverage that into being able to get a lot more projects in the development pipeline.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Any pairing of engineering permitting expertise, it makes me happy. Right. Especially in the energy space. So bringing the constellation team that knows that has a widely varied a skill set and also bringing Calpine into that, the exact same thing. Putting this conglomerate together I would expect to see some pretty big moves after this thing closes within the next 12 months and in the next 12 months after that.

So be prepared to watch Constellation make some moves in the renewable energy space and, and the energy space in general. The interesting thing here, if you’ve been following it, Constellation stock jumped 35 percent or over 35 percent since this Merger. So good on him.