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Africa GreenCo has announced that Sanlam Alternative Investments has become its first private institutional shareholder. The Sanlam Investments unit invested $10 million for a 10% stake in GreenCo.
GreenCo is a renewable energy trader and buyer accelerating the energy transition across the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP). The team of more than 80 professionals operates across Zambia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia, with licensing underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
GreenCo combines four capabilities in a single customer-led model: bankable long-term offtake agreements with renewable IPPs; power sale agreements with mines, commercial and industrial customers, and utilities; continuous regional trading across SAPP and, in future, the emerging South African Wholesale Electricity Market (SAWEM); and active portfolio optimisation.
It is this combination, rather than any single element, that gives each party what it needs. For IPPs and their lenders, GreenCo provides a creditworthy counterparty without single-buyer exposure. For commercial and industrial consumers, it offers reliable, lower-carbon power while managing market complexity on their behalf. For utilities, it acts as a partner that supports system outcomes through wheeling, settlement and participation in the regional market.
Over the past decade, Sanlam Alternative Investments has deployed more than ZAR 17 billion (about $1 billion) into 40 sustainable infrastructure projects across Africa, through managed funds, including Sanlam Alternative Investments’ Sustainable Infrastructure Fund.
“We built GreenCo on the belief that Africa should not wait for someone else to finance its energy transition; if the continent can provide its own creditworthy, commercially bankable market infrastructure then institutional capital will follow. Sanlam Alternative Investments has been one of the most consistent allocators of capital into African sustainable infrastructure for more than a decade, and their aim to be Africa’s premier sustainable and impact investor maps directly onto the role GreenCo plays in Southern Africa’s power markets. This round positions GreenCo to further scale and to keep delivering the bankable offtake that finances new generation and the reliable, increasingly lowcarbon power that commercial and large industrial users across the region depend on,” said Pug Bennet, GreenCo co-founder and group CFO.
“GreenCo occupies the part of the energy value chain that determines whether new power generation is actually delivered. For Sanlam Alternative Investments, this investment is a natural extension of more than a decade of infrastructure investment across the continent: backing the market architecture that allows Africa to finance its own energy transition on commercial terms, while supporting the reliable, increasingly low-carbon power that economic growth depends on,” commented Mark Moorhouse, executive head of infrastructure finance at Sanlam Alternative Investments.
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