Asper is pleased to announce the final close of its UK sustainable district heating co-investment platform, which reached its hard-cap of £220m commitments from UK and global institutional investors. The investment vehicle, called “Duke”, was established to support investments in 1Energy, a greenfield platform focused on developing, building and operating sustainable heat networks in city centres across the UK, as well as acquiring and driving the decarbonisation of existing schemes – with a strong focus on mid-sized cities and strategic fit with levelling-up areas. Duke is managed by Asper, which is utilizing the co-investment partnership model it has developed to invest in large-scale greenfield development alongside institutional investors. Asper has successfully implemented this model across its previous partnerships in the UK, Netherlands and Ireland. Given its positive contribution to decarbonisation objectives, it is classified as Article 9 SFDR fund, like all of Asper’s funds. 1Energy is an independent developer of UK sustainable district heating networks, led by co-founders Andrew Wettern and Jeremy Bungey; together they have over 25 years of experience in senior leadership positions in energy companies such as E.On, Metropolitan and Babcock International Group. 1Energy has a proprietary pipeline of more than 10 projects, of which Bradford is the most advanced having started construction in November of last year. As the efforts to decarbonize Europe’s economies ramp up in this decade while energy costs are rising, the energy efficiency and heating/cooling sector is coming into increasingly sharp focus. Asper sees its Infrastructure Growth Equity approach as particularly well suited to unlock the growth potential of district heating and heating/cooling networks to serve urban and industrial clusters.
