Our Firm
Modern Energy seeks a world with abundant, accessible, sustainable energy for everyone.
Modern Energy is an energy asset management firm that invests in businesses that bring emerging energy technologies to market and the energy resources those businesses produce. From energy efficiency in the United States to solar projects in Brazil to virtual power plants in the United Kingdom, Modern supports leaders in the transition to a digital energy ecosystem.
New hardware and software innovations are rapidly reshaping the competitive landscape of energy markets. Cost reductions in energy efficiency, generation, management, and storage are changing the economics of energy markets. At the same time, new software applications are dramatically reducing the transaction costs required to purchase, aggregate, dispatch, and monetize millions of small energy installations, ranging from industrial coolers to solar home systems. Together, these changes represent a once in a century transformation of our energy ecosystem and enable Modern Energy to play a catalytic role in bringing market-moving price and technology trends to scale.
Investment PHILOSOPHY
Our investment activities are driven by our beliefs about the market:
- Distributed Energy Growth - We believe the proportion of energy produced worldwide by Distributed Energy will increase dramatically in the next several decades.
- Energy Market Disruption - We believe distributed energy technologies will both disrupt traditional energy markets as well as alter the economics of energy markets in large and small-scale ways.
- Capital Agility - We believe intelligent investors must tailor their investment solutions to the stage or maturity of the developer with whom they are working. That will trend towards enterprise/corporate investments when the developer is young, and can transition to asset investment as the portfolio and developer mature.
- Generalization - We believe the technologies, strategies, systems and learnings discovered in one local market can be applied to numerous other disparate local markets.
- Localization - We believe local market conditions, management teams, and business contexts are determinant forces in investment opportunities and separate strong opportunities from weak.
- Falling Transaction Costs - We believe new technologies are enabling developers to focus on smaller and more distributed energy assets by reducing transaction costs throughout the development cycle.
- Democratization - We believe the adoption of distributed energy is creating material opportunities to democratize energy access.
- Transitional Markets - We believe the richest opportunities are found in transitional markets where the most economic solution for market participants has recently changed. First movers, who identify the right bellwether events, can create outsized returns in these markets.
- Risk Pricing - We believe risk in transitional markets is often mispriced. A business able to price risks appropriately is poised to profit disproportionately.
- Slow-moving Incumbents - We believe high regulatory hurdles, large revenue expectations on sunk costs, and a lack of agility will cause incumbents to struggle to pursue some new energy opportunities on their own, leaving space for others to collaborate or compete.