REUTERS/Danny Moloshok
- Goldman Sachs is making strides into renewable energy through its internal business incubator, GS Accelerate which only proceeded with eight of about 1,000 entries last year.
- The bank is hiring for a VP of operations whose responsibilities will include investment strategies in the "green/renewable energy industry."
- It’s part of a broader push by the bank into green investing following the recent equity financing for lithium battery producer Northvolt.
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Goldman Sachs has greenlit another idea coming out of its internal business incubator and this time it’s taking aim at making investments in the renewable power industry.
That’s the message to come out of a recent job advertisement, in which Goldman is looking to hire a vice president of operations, according to the posting on Glassdoor. Part of the candidate’s responsibilities will be to build a customer service organization from the ground up.
"As part of one of the Accelerate projects, we are looking to build a team to help pursue investment strategies in the green/renewable energy industry," it said. "Potential investment strategies are wide ranging and include a number of businesses across the renewable energy value chain, including asset development, broker/re-seller, technology development, and retail provider."
A Goldman spokesman declined to elaborate on the posting, or offer any additional comment.
The job is part of Goldman’s Accelerate program, an internal idea incubator that launched last March. Goldman selected just eight projects out of about 1,000 submissions last year making this new project something of a rarity.
One, called Neon, is a search engine built by the compliance division to find data, conduct surveillance, and detect pattern anomalies. Another, called Polaris, is a portfolio management tool used by the private credit business to analyze closely held firms using data traditionally managed in Excel. The incubator serves as a space to help develop experimental ideas which may or may not come to full fruition.
The move is part of a plan to increase Goldman Sachs exposure to the renewable energy space, according to sources familiar with the matter. Goldman has increased its ESG and renewables spend in recent years and recently led a $1 billion equity financing deal for Swedish lithium battery producer Northvolt in a move which will see Europe’s first gigaplant built in Germany as part of a push into electric vehicles.
Goldman has already provided some $80 billion of investment to renewables projects either directly or as part of other deals in recent years. While not a dedicated pool of capital, the bank has a plan to deploy $150 billion into clean energy projects and Goldman is "long this trend" Michael Bruun, a partner at the bank who worked on the Northvolt, said in an interview with Business Insider.
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Source: Business Insider – cburroughs@businessinsider.com (Callum Burroughs)