Greenko to raise climate fund from TPG for green ammonia business

Greenko group, one of India’s largest renewable energy companies, is in talks with private equity investor TPG Rise Climate fund to raise as much as $750 million in its green ammonia business.

TPG Rise fund, one of the most active investors in India’s clean energy space, has signed an exclusivity pact with Greenko and a deal announcement is likely in the coming months if the talks fructify, according to the persons cited above.

Hyderabad-based Greenko group is building India’s largest green ammonia facility under unit Greenko ZeroC (GZC). Green ammonia is a fuel that can be used in existing internal combustion engines. It’s also renewable and produced using a process called hydrogenation. In February, Germany-based Uniper Group signed an agreement with Greenko ZeroC to source green ammonia. Besides green ammonia, Uniper and Greenko also intend to collaborate on deploying similar flexible renewable electricity to other hydrogen products such as e-methanol and sustainable aviation fuels. Greenko’s Kakinada project is a multi-phase green ammonia production and export facility that will add up to 1 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of green ammonia production capacity by 2027.

Greenko Group has an installed capacity base of 7.3 GW across solar, wind and hydro generation technologies spread over ~100+ projects across 15 states and delivering 20+ bn units of renewable energy annually that contributes ~1.5-2 percent of India’s total electricity needs. Greenko is committed to transforming energy from intermittent sources such as wind into reliable, dispatchable and on-demand energy controlled by digitization and long-duration storage.

Founded by Anil Chalamalasetty and Mahesh Kolli, Greenko is now majority-owned by global institutional investors, which include the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. (GIC), Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and Orix Corp. (Orix), among others. Launched in early 2021, the TPG Rise Climate fund is led by TPG’s founding partner, Jim Coulter and former US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who serves as Executive Chairman. The fund manages a corpus of $18 billion globally and focuses on five climate sub-sectors: energy transition, green mobility, sustainable fuels, sustainable molecules, and carbon solutions.