Renewables need trillions in new capital to hit global energy transition targets. Yet much of the sector remains trapped in SPV silos: every wind farm, solar park, or battery site is ring-fenced, largely financed separately and reported as an average of strong and weak assets.
That structure got us here, but it won’t get us further.
Other real asset sectors have already broken free of this bottleneck. Aircraft leasing is a prime example.
Why Aircraft Leasing Attracts Deep Capital
Aircraft leasing has built one of the most transparent and liquid secondary markets in finance. Lessors, banks, and investors can trade billions of dollars of aircraft-backed securities with confidence. Why?
Because aircraft are backed by standardized, trusted transparency metrics:
- Fungibility: A Boeing 747 or Airbus A350 is the same everywhere.
- Usage metrics: Flight hours and take-off/landing cycles create a universal measure of wear.
- Maintenance logs: Strict, auditable records governed by global aviation authorities.
- Condition checks: Regular C- and D-checks ensure ongoing airworthiness.
- Resale market: Aircraft can be repossessed, re-leased, and re-sold globally, with published market values.
This transparency allows investors to price risk, benchmark value, and confidently participate in securitizations and ABS structures.
Why Renewables Lag Behind
Renewables, by contrast, remain opaque:
- Fragmented SPVs: Each project is ring-fenced, creating hundreds of legal entities per fund.
- Inconsistent metrics: P50/P90, load factor, availability, and curtailment definitions vary wildly.
- Patchy maintenance records: Logs are inconsistent, siloed, or locked with service providers.
- Site-locked assets: Turbines can’t be repossessed or redeployed, so resale markets are limited.
- Opaque NAVs: Fund valuations are based on DCF assumptions, leaving investors skeptical and often trading at discounts.
The result: higher cost of capital, limited liquidity, and a narrow investor base.
The Breakthrough: Turbine-Level Transparency
To move beyond SPV sprawl, renewables need their equivalent of “flight hours and maintenance logs.” That means:
- Standardized performance data – harmonized SCADA metrics, consistent availability and curtailment definitions.
- Forward-looking health indicators – predictive analytics on blades, gearboxes, and generators.
- Consistent, auditable maintenance histories – investor-grade, transferable, and comparable.
Crucially, renewables also need to embed ROI into preventative maintenance. In aviation, every replaced component is logged, benchmarked, and its return measured in terms of asset life extension and risk reduction. Renewables have been slower to quantify this. A gearbox repair may avoid catastrophic downtime, but without a transparent ROI calculation it remains an “expense” rather than an investor-grade decision metric. Closing this loop turns engineering actions into financial signals investors can trust.
With these foundations, each turbine can carry a transparent, investor-grade performance score.
The Missing Piece: A Turbine-Level Financial Engine
Performance data is only half the story. To make renewables investable at scale, investors also need cashflows that can be carved up, tracked, and reconciled at the unit level.
That requires a financial engine able to:
- Allocate revenues and costs down to each turbine or inverter.
- Normalize for curtailment, downtime, and grid events.
- Integrate predictive maintenance into forward cashflow models.
- Package results into standardized, auditable reports.
With this plumbing in place, each turbine becomes a mini cashflow engine that can be pooled, tranched, and traded—just as individual aircraft are today.
What That Unlocks
1.Structured Finance (Green CLOs)
Turbines can be pooled and tranched:
- Senior slices backed by stable, high-performing turbines.
- Junior slices exposed to weaker assets with higher potential yield.
This opens renewables to pension funds, insurers, and other investors who demand clarity and risk-differentiation.
2. NAV Credibility
Fund NAV movements can be attributed to asset-level performance, not opaque averages.
Strong managers can demonstrate value creation; weak managers will face pressure to improve. This isn’t theoretical, it mirrors what we’re already seeing in private markets. LPs are consolidating manager relationships and demanding transparency across strategies. Funds that evidence true asset-level value creation will win that capital; those relying on opacity will be left behind.
3. Tokenization
Once turbines are scored and tranched, tokenization becomes possible.
Fractional ownership, programmable cashflows, and secondary liquidity bring a much wider investor pool from institutions to retail ESG platforms.
- The Twin-Edged Sword
- Transparency will cut both ways:
- Winners: Managers with strong fleets and disciplined O&M attract cheaper, deeper pools of capital.
- Laggards: Weak assets and poor practices are exposed, NAV discounts widen, and consolidation accelerates.
But this is exactly how mature capital markets are supposed to function: risk priced fairly, capital flowing to quality.
Conclusion: Breaking Beyond the SPV
Aircraft leasing shows what’s possible when assets are standardized, transparent, and benchmarked. Renewables can’t stay locked in thousands of SPVs forever.
With turbine-level transparency, preventative maintenance tracked as ROI, and capital markets demanding credibility, the path forward is clear: open the box, build the plumbing, and let capital flow to quality.
Transparency isn’t the risk. It’s the unlock.
