In brief: Goldman describes ‘making boring infrastructure part of the transition story’

Goldman Sachs Asset Management sees an investment opportunity in “making boring traditional infrastructure… part of the transition story”, according to Philippe Camu, co-head of the firm’s infrastructure group. Speaking at a roundtable for the firm last week, Camu said investors had been “brown-to-greening” infrastructure “for as long as I can remember”, and well before the recent momentum behind the energy transition.

His own firm, for example, had been investing in “a lot of UK ports that were handling a lot of coal”. Replacing this coal with “all of the renewable infrastructure that was required to build the offshore wind farms” has been “a huge part of our investing thesis 15-plus years ago”, said Camu. “It was not investing in energy transition as such… but that boring infrastructure is essential to the energy transition movement.”

Similarly, infrastructure investors today could make roads in their portfolios part of the energy transition by building electric vehicle charging infrastructure.