CIP to target at least €12bn for Fund V next year

Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners has confirmed to Infrastructure Investor that it is planning to launch the fifth iteration of its flagship fund series in early 2023 with a target of €12-15 billion. There’s no hard-cap, a spokesman said, and the strategy will be core-plus and dark green.

The new CIP fund could rival the recently closed $15 billion Brookfield Energy Transition Fund for size and establish green energy as a mega-fund-worthy asset class.

As with CIP’s previous four flagship funds, the plan is to invest in comparatively well-known and tested technologies, such as solar and wind, and to keep the location of the investments to economically and politically stable OECD countries.

Unlike its previous funds, however, CIP will be raising Fund V without the help of Steen Lønberg Jørgensen, the Danish firm’s head of investor relations and fundraising since 2016, who left the firm in September after helping to raise more than €15 billion for CIP and earning a place on Infrastructure Investor‘s latest Rainmaker 20 list.

If the coming flagship V fund reaches its target, the new fund will be around twice the size of the fourth flagship fund, which closed on €7billion in April 2021 against a target of €5.5 billion.

Offshore ambitions

Copenhagen-based CIP’s announcement is hot on the heels of the 33 percent oversubscribed closure at €3 billion of CIP’s inaugural energy transition fund in August, and comes just weeks after the company made it known that it was aiming to build five new offshore wind parks in Denmark with a total capacity of no less than 6.3GW.

Denmark currently has 2.3GW of offshore wind capacity and has struggled to get offshore wind park projects past the planning phase in the past year due to environmental regulations and suitability concerns.

CIP’s spokesman told Infrastructure Investor that the five wind parks were indeed anything but certain and that, furthermore, these projects were not expected to be included in the new fund. Nor would CIP’s much hyped hydrogen island in the North Sea be included. Instead, some of the fifth fund’s projects will be rolled over from the pipeline for the previous flagship fund.

CIP is targeting an AUM of €100 billion by 2030, and the stated expectation is to launch a new flagship fund every three years. At the moment, the company has €19 billion of assets under management.