The world’s largest renewable power company is selling its distributed generation development platform.
The clean energy developer Madison Energy Infrastructure has acquired the distributed generation development platform from NextEra Energy Resources, the power giant’s renewable arm, Latitude Media has learned. Included in the transaction is a portfolio of solar and energy storage assets, a pipeline of projects under development, and the NextEra team responsible for the platform.
This represents an expansion into new types of assets for Madison. The company has long worked with commercial and industrial customers, as well as schools and other public buildings; and rooftop solar and battery storage have dominated its strategy. NextEra, however, has expertise in DG for heavy industrial customers, as well municipal and cooperative utilities. The combination, Madison CEO Richard Walsh told Latitude Media, allows them to “round out that broader market for distributed clean infrastructure.”
“We feel like we can serve all customer segments now with this addition,” he added. After the deal, Madison will have nearly a gigawatt of clean distributed infrastructure under its generation, spanning all regions of the United States. The New York-based team will include roughly 160 employees after bringing on the NextEra team.
That said, Madison wasn’t actively looking to make an acquisition, when NextEra’s platform came up for sale. “Platforms like this only go up for sale once,” he said, adding that Madison remains fundamentally bullish on distributed generation in the long-term, even in a moment of uncertainty for the market that has prompted other companies to pull out.
This uncertainty is in part because of policy shifts put in place by the Trump administration. For instance, the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed in July sunsets the 30% tax credit for utility- and commercial-scale solar sunsets at the end of 2027; the bill as a whole is expected to slash clean energy deployment by as much as 60% over the next decade, according to one analysis.
“While others are pulling out, we actually think the fundamentals — irrespective of policy or anything — have gotten so much better,” he said. “We thought now is a great time to make sure we have all these customer segments covered.”
In a moment of load growth, Walsh is betting that the need for new generation, and fast, will actually benefit the distributed generation side of the market. And that’s especially true as retail rates soar and it can take months for a utility-scale project to interconnect.
“Generation can happen really fast, and we can have an impact immediately, without any capital upfront,” he said. “The demand we have from customers, inbound outreach, it’s different. I mean, we’re doing bilateral transactions with big time customers that would have never happened before, because they are starting to feel the urgency.” Walsh said the actual time to power for these facilities varies widely, but ranges from six months to a couple of years.
“It’s wide ranging, which, again, is another reason why we love DG, is because if you have one state or one utility that’s going slow, maybe the other one’s speeding,” Walsh said.
“There’s just a lot of diversification that comes with it.”
Madison’s evolving strategic approach
Founded in 2019, the company got its start as a pretty hands-off investor-developer; they would have partners bring them projects that were largely ready to go, manage some of the construction but for the most part act as an investor.
That approach, however, has changed as the market has matured. “We still, of course, will invest and acquire projects,” Walsh said. “But more and more of our businesses is working closely with the customer, since we’re the two folks that are going to be in it for the long haul.”
That’s one reason Walsh is so animated about the NextEra acquisition; it comes with a team that knows this new customer segment — namely big industrials — well. “The development is way more intricate than just going to…a grocery chain, or something,” he said. “They have complicated energy needs. Their storage is going to be involved a lot; it could change the way their tariffs are structured. So it’s just a really dynamic, complicated development origination cycle.”
This comes just weeks after the company secured an $800 million long-term debt facility, funded by both new and existing investors. Walsh said the state of the renewable energy market under Trump’s second term was “a part of the discussion,” though ultimately, the round was oversubscribed.
“A lot of these banks are international too, and so they see renewables from a global perspective, and I think appreciate the value of a quality player in the space,” he said. “I think it was more of a differentiation exercise this time, and clearly resonated.”
