Accelerating Financing and Development for Energy Transition Projects: Why DNV invested in HST
August 15, 2024 – DNV, a global leader in assurance and risk management, invested in HST Technologies, a leading technology company focused on accelerating bankable large energy transition projects. Building off of DNV’s experience supporting asset developers, tax equity investors, and the broader financier ecosystem, DNV invested in HST to provide the industry access to clean energy and storage project information to accelerate the energy transition. Powerhouse catalyzed the partnership between DNV Ventures and HST as part of its work to identify strategic energy transition and climate investment opportunities for DNV.
What are the key barriers to deploying clean energy project infrastructure?
Even the best developers experience difficulty while navigating the complex layered picture of transmission capacity, economic zones, buyer demand, and regional policy. Quality insights into which locations ensure strong project economics and completion rates are rare.
In 2023 DNV helped its customers to progress on 400 GW of renewable power capacity in the United States, reflecting the wave of clean energy projects in development.
However, inherent project risk (e.g. interconnection, permitting, PPA contracting, and more) hampers how fast renewable energy lenders can approve financing, leaving power developers with long development and financing cycles.
Developing these projects is a multidimensional challenge including landowner selection and negotiation, interconnection applications. offtake, EPC and capital markets negotiations.
Due to labor intensity and silos, developers have not had access to comprehensive project readiness assessments for their internal Investment Committees or external parties, leading to a lack of standardization for financing.
How will HST and DNV accelerate project development?
View, HST’s digital marketplace, helps clean energy project developers contract quickly with qualified landowners, offtakers, lenders, and investors. They can plug in their own legal paper and interconnection strategy, and tap into HST and DNV’s standardized View project readiness score to accelerate project red flag analysis.
The View Develop Marketplace has embedded project development insight and intelligence. Its greenfield listings have pre-vetted landowners behind them. It brings dynamically updated land information based on predictive aggregate PPA buyer demand, transmission capacity, economic zone status, and local community support outlooks.
Clean energy developers who use the View Develop Marketplace to find pre-vetted listings enjoy the integrated DNV pre-bankable energy generation models used by financiers. Coupled with the platform’s pre-vetted PPA offtakers, this brings forward pre-bankability by years.
Developers can use the marketplace to find landowners who can be trusted to close Site Control Agreements and offtakers who can be trusted to close PPAs. These are vital steps for the industry to bring forward timelines for debt financing.
Powerhouse is proud to help DNV to partner with companies like HST. We look forward to working with Kaare Helle and the entire DNV Ventures team to help startups like HST achieve scale. To discover how Powerhouse can expand your firm’s engagement with the climate tech startup ecosystem, reach out to us here.
Authored by Powerhouse Senior Director of Technology and Client Services, Octavi Semonin.
To read more about our work at Powerhouse and Powerhouse Ventures, visit our Insights page.
