London-based, sustainable real assets investment specialist, Asper Investment Management's thought leadership paper on 'Funding the energy transition's hardware revolutionaries' explores the practicalities of the energy transition and how private equity investors, institutional investors, project developers, and policymakers can contribute to the energy transition.

The paper, authored by Luigi Pettinicchio, founder and CEO of Asper Investment Management, and Sarah Ivory, lecturer in climate change and business strategy at the University of Edinburgh Business School, draws parallels between the "software revolution" that has changed our societies since the 1970s and the "hardware revolution" currently underway.

This paper discusses backing engineering companies that are developing additional renewable energy capacity during the growth stage, in order to transition to clean energy at the necessary speed and scale.

This means investing in "hardware revolutionaries", typically small-scale engineering companies able to manage the construction of large sustainable infrastructure projects.

So far this investment has mostly been in the area of existing assets but the paper proposes that a successful transition to clean energy will rely on engineering companies developing these projects at the growth stage.

The finance industry, it is argued, needs to evolve to support infrastructure development companies at an earlier stage.

Pettinicchio commented: "The scale and urgency of the energy transition require the finance industry to step up and innovate in order to support the engineers and greenfield developers on the front line of the hardware revolution."