By:Newsday

OLD Mutual’s interest in renewable energy has been established over a period now, and we continue that commitment.

Within the Old Mutual operations themselves, we seek to uphold responsible business practices and we are looking at how we can ensure that we are climate-friendly in the way that we conduct business. One way is transitioning our sources of energy to renewable and clean energy.

So, we have invested in sources of renewable energy within the group, solar plants at our head office and other major offices.

We can count up to 1,4 megawatts (MW) of power that is deployed within our buildings and our offices for our benefit as the operators in those premises, or our clients who also occupy that space. This is what we are doing to demonstrate that commitment internally.

This is in addition to other initiatives to ensure that we pursue the sustainability agenda strongly.

The second level is in terms of how we have supported investments in renewable energy. We have invested in a hydro plant, for example, in Manicaland.

We have invested in a solar plant in Hwange. We have also invested in solar plants in Masvingo, Matabeleland and some close to Harare.

We are counting now up to 43MW over the recent past that we have delivered onto the grid or into microgrids. We have a pipeline of projects.

Just recently, we added another two to the pipeline of continuing work that we are embarking on.

The other level that I would like to talk about is the role that we seek to play as Old Mutual to assist in the gathering of funds or pooling of resources to deploy into infrastructure related to renewable energy. An example of that was the launch of the Renewable Energy Fund that we did last year.

In this fund, we have partnered the government. We have private sector players and private investors also coming on board.

This is a US$100 million fund and we are also partnering the United Nations agencies in it.

Currently committed to the fund is about US$21 million and we continue to mobilise more. We have about US$10 million of that already allocated. We are now seeking to make sure that we deploy the balance of what’s been committed, even as we are growing the fund.

It is a blended financing structure if you like to call it that way, blended in the sense that we have got participants who are primarily looking for social impacts.

And the nature of the funding in terms of returns, they are also placing a lot of emphasis on the social impacts.

We have the government coming in and they are also seeking outcomes within the social impacts space as well as how they will support private sector investors to also come in and enjoy the blended rates that we get out of the fund.

Then we have private sector players seeking economic returns, even as they are also conscious about the sustainability impacts of this fund.

It is a fund that we are prioritising very highly, as one of the efforts we are undertaking over the next few years. If we can get this one right, we believe it will catalyse the scaling up of the funds that would be channelled into renewable energy.

We are also promoting startups in the renewable energy value chain.

We have at Eight2Five Innovation Hub participants who come from the renewable energy value chain and they are showcasing their ideas.

We profile their projects and we get them to start accessing financial resources.