Allen Hall, Philip Totaro, and Joel Saxum dive into the potential sale of VSB Group, Hydro Rein's acquisition of a massive wind portfolio, and Iberdrola increasing its stake in Avangrid. They also analyze Macquarie Capital's purchase of wind analytics firm ONYX Insight, providing expert insights on these pivotal moves shaping the clean energy industry.

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Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I'm here with the founder and CEO oIntelStor,r, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. And this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you need actionable information about renewable projects or technologies, check out IntelStor at intelstor.com.

Partners Group, a Swiss private equity firm, is exploring options including a potential sale for German renewable energy company VSB Group. The sale process could begin in the second quarter of VSB's valuation estimated between 3. One and two billion dollars, including debt. If the sale proceeds, VSB is expected to attract interest from infrastructure funds and utilities.

The possible sale comes amid a drop in renewable asset values, although interest in the sector remains high, obviously, in the European Union and aims for about 42 percent of the block's energy in renewables by 2030. Phil, this is another sale, possible sale, in the billions of dollars. These numbers are huge. Renewable energy, although there's been a lot of pundits about renewable energy, it is still worth a lot of value.

Philip Totaro: Indeed. And this is continuing to move along the same trend that we've seen recently in the industry, where you've got a lot of infrastructure funds now loading up on renewable energy asset owners, operators, developers, et cetera because they want to be able to have somebody with experience in the space.

So it's certainly, a better strategy for them than, just developing greenfield projects themselves or partnering with somebody else to do that. And to be honest, a lot of the asset developers want to be able to sell off whatever chunk of a project they might still own by the time it's commissioned because they want the capital to be able to redeploy in building new greenfield projects.

So you know, eventually you're going to start seeing more and more just like you do in other industries. And we've been talking about this on Newsflash. Joel's mentioned it numerous times about how. Infrastructure funds are just getting really, warmed up and excited about piling into these type of asset owners.

Allen Hall: Hydro Rein, a Norwegian renewable energy company, has reached an agreement with Swedish developer IOWN Energy to acquire 80 percent stake in a 2. 4 gigawatt portfolio of wind power projects under development in Sweden and Norway. The portfolio comprises 23 projects in Sweden and two in Norway, all of which are in the early stages of development.

Hydro Rein and IOWN will collaborate to advance these projects, engaging with local stakeholders and aiming to make their initial investments before 2030. Sweden and Norway active in renewables right now, a lot more than I thought they would be at this point. So they are stepping on the accelerator pedal again.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, and this one's interesting because, Hydro Rein is obviously a utility company that has a lot of renewable assets alre...