United Kingdom’s largest workplace pension scheme has announced a $1.95 billion green energy push after agreeing to an infrastructure partnership worth an initial $347 with Octopus Renewables, a specialist clean energy provider. The investment by Nest in green energy could reach $2.79 billion by the end of the decade, subject to new inflows from the scheme’s members and growth in demand for renewables.
Pension funds worldwide are facing growing demands from younger environmentally conscious savers to accelerate the transition to a low carbon future. The move by Nest comes ahead of the UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow this year where fresh proposals to curtail catastrophic global warming will be debated. The company manages $22.7 billion of UK pension savings, will invest directly into the onshore wind and solar energy projects in various parts of Europe with its aim to become a net-zero carbon scheme by 2050. A survey of 1,183 pension savers in July found that almost two-thirds of respondents thought their retirement scheme should invest in a way that reduces the impacts of climate change Octopus is one of the largest developers of renewable energy infrastructure in Europe with a $4.17 billion portfolio of solar, wind, and biomass projects.
Renewable energy contributed 40.2 per cent of the UK’s total electricity generation in the third quarter of 2020, compared with the 42.5 per cent share provided by fossil fuels, almost all of which came from gas. In November 2020, the United Kingdom announced a 10 point green industrial revolution plan which will mobilise $16.17 billion of public investment to attract three times as much capital from private sector sources.