Industry super funds have got the power, literally
The degree to which industry superannuation funds directly own Australia’s wind and solar electricity assets has been revealed by a new research paper.
The research paper, to be released at this week’s Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) conference in Brisbane, reveals:
Rest Super fully owns the Collgar Wind Farm near Merredin in WA’s central wheatbelt.
The Snowtown 2 wind farm is owned by Aware Super (33%), and by Palisade Investment Partners (67%) on behalf of other institutional investors, including HESTA.
Cbus has a significant ownership stake in the Albany Grasmere Wind Farm, the Warradarge Wind Farm and the Greenough River Solar Farm in Western Australia through Bright Energy Investments – a joint venture with Synergy, the WA government energy generator and retailer and DIF, an institutional investment partner.
A number of funds – including Hostplus and Brighter Super – have investments via Tilt Renewables, including in the Broken Hill and Nyngan solar plants in NSW, and the Coopers Gap and Silverton wind farms in Queensland.
Other wind and solar generation facilities with super fund investment include at Bald Hills in Victoria (Future Super), and Stockyard Hill in Victoria (Aware).
At the same time, the ASFA paper confirms that the largest distribution on Australia’s east coast, Ausgrid, is owned by IFM Investors and AustralianSuper, while also noting that Aware Super has made an investment in North Harbour Clean Energy which is working to develop and operate renewable energy storage projects.
The ASFA paper said that over coming decades superannuation funds would play an increasingly important role in the Australian economy and pointed to the manner in which their investment in infrastructure had increased from around $30 billion in 2010 to $165 billion today.
Evidence that Industry super is doing the bidding of the ideological Ben to style ALP . Hope the hideous returns from these assets are accurately reported to members . Not holding breath though ….
Why wouldn’t you invest in these assets. You can even pick your own valuations and you can call them defensive assets too. I’d be confident the 33% holding in a Windfarm in the middle of nowhere, would be classified as a “liquid investment” with AwareSuper as well. No doubt the cost of these assets are are about 0.001% as all the expenses would be written off in some accounting trick. All providing of course you’re a Super Fund you can do anything.
This is what you call a hybrid Ponzi scheme when the units are not valued correctly and only once people start withdrawing cash do they write down the value of the fund