'India offers unmatched scale'

Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management, one of the world’s largest renewable and infrastructure investors, has been investing aggressively in the Indian market, boosting its energy assets in the country fourfold to 16,000MW in just a year.

- Sneha Shah

In an interview, Nawal Saini, managing director of Brookfield’s Renewable Power and Transition Group, spoke about investments, opportunities in the country and the importance of India in its global expansion plans. Edited excerpts:

Brookfield has stepped up investments in India, especially on renewables. How has the business shaped up?

We have been growing very consistently in the last four or five years. We’ve had a bit of a step change in our growth, as it’s publicly known, especially in the last six months. So, at least when I started, we were at around 300MW of operating assets, around $170-200 million of assets under management (AUM). Today, money has gone through various sorts of deals that we’ve done, and various structures and platforms are operating or have development capacity under construction and pipeline in total aggregates roughly about 16,000MW. In terms of AUM (assets under management), I think we are close to $3 billion now. And this doesn’t include the follow-on capital that we have earmarked. Even six months back, we were about a billion dollars. So, it’s been quite a steep growth.

How does the near-term pipeline look? What would the AUM target be 2-3 years from now?