Duke Energy has agreed to sell its utility-scale renewables business to Brookfield Renewable for $2.8 billion. Duke will now pivot to focus on its utility business, including investments to improve grid reliability.
“As one of the country’s largest renewable energy operators, Brookfield has the resources to support the continued growth and success of the Commercial Renewables’ portfolio,” said Lynn Good, Duke Energy chair, president and CEO. “This sale is an important step in our transition into a purely regulated company with significant grid and clean energy investment plans that will deliver benefits to our customers and stakeholders.”
Credit: Duke Energy
The sale agreement for Duke’s Commercial Renewables business platform includes more than 3,400 MWAC of utility scale solar, wind and battery storage across the United States, net of joint venture partners ownership, in addition to operations, new project development, and current projects under construction. The primary operations of this business will remain in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Duke Energy employees that support the business will transition over to Brookfield to maintain business continuity for its operations and customers.
“With this acquisition, we are adding a scale operating renewable platform with a full suite of in-house capabilities and a proven management team experienced in operations and development,” said Connor Teskey, CEO of Brookfield Renewable. “We are also adding to our pipeline of renewable development projects, solidifying our position as one of the largest renewable energy businesses in the U.S. with almost 90,000 MW of operating and development assets.”
The sale is subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the expiration of the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. The sale is expected to close by the end of 2023. Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC and Wells Fargo Securities, LLC are serving as financial advisors to Duke Energy for this transaction. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP is serving as legal counsel to Duke Energy.
Duke Energy also continues to make strong progress on a separate sale underway for its distributed energy business, which is also expected to close by year-end 2023.
Last year, Brookfield completed the acquisition of renewable energy developers Standard Solar and Scout Clean Energy.
News item from Duke Energy
“Duke Energy has agreed to sell its utility-scale renewables business to Brookfield Renewable for $2.8 billion. Duke will now pivot to focus on its utility business, including investments to improve grid reliability.”
This is a “tell” that Duke is looking to become a “wires only” electricity dispatch company that will be in the EaaS commodity electricity marketplace of the near future. Large IOU electric utilities are already moving in this direction. Look at PG&E in California. It’s O.K. with PG&E to not install anymore natural gas infrastructure and go all electric in their service area. PG&E after the Camp Fire is in the process of ‘undergrounding’ about 10,000 miles of electric service feeders, are starting to construct local micro-grids in remote areas to abandon feeders into wildlands areas that have been the cause of wildfires in the past. In some areas PG&E is looking for utiltity scale micro-grids to serve communities as local ‘edge generation’ services to communities instead of more transmission lines into a particular region.