BlackRock Just Bought a Minnesota Utility [View all]

https://prospect.org/environment/blackrock-minnesota-utility-private-equity/



ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA – The private equity takeover of Minnesota Power’s parent company, ALLETE, will now move forward after all five members of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) agreed to approve the $6.2 billion deal on Friday morning. In an interview with the Prospect, Alissa Jean Schafer, climate and energy director at Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP), said the ALLETE acquisition “is just going to be a line item in an aggressive strategy” by BlackRock-owned Global Infrastructure Partners to cash in on the artificial intelligence-data center boom.

“We see BlackRock positioning itself very aggressively to take advantage of the entire supply chain when it comes to AI and data centers, and power generation is a really key part of that,” Schafer told the Prospect. The business case for buying a utility is obvious: the data center buildout is jacking up electricity demand, and with the Trump administration strangling both new electricity generation and transmission capacity, prices are going up.

By year-end, BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board will own 60 percent and 40 percent of ALLETE, respectively. The recent decision comes as Global Infrastructure Partners inches closer to acquiring multinational utility company AES for approximately $38 billion; sources familiar with the matter told the Financial Times it “would be one of the largest infrastructure takeovers of all time.”

Critics of the deal remain skeptical of its purported benefits, which include an estimated $200 million in customer benefits. According to Hudson Kingston, legal director at CURE, an intervenor in the case, “the very temporary protections, programs, and funding tacked onto this deal cannot offset the billions of dollars of profit the new owners intend to reap from northern Minnesota households and businesses.”

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