‘Scale is how you win’: Macquarie’s Ed Northam on green investing

March 10, 2026

This article was reproduced under license from Infrastructure Investor.

MAM's Green Investments global head talks to Daniel Kemp about the investment opportunities the fund manager continues to see in delivering new green energy infrastructure, including in US renewables - while acknowledging that projects have generally become more difficult to deliver.

Delivering new energy infrastructure in the modern age “is without doubt getting harder and more complex”, says Ed Northam, global head of Green Investments, Macquarie Asset Management. 

Northam stepped up to lead MAM’s flagship renewable energy investment arm at the beginning of 2026, after around four years as its head of APAC, which followed a five-year stint leading the business in Europe. He has, in fact, been around the organisation even longer than that, being involved as he was in the initial establishment of it when it was a UK government entity known as the Green Investment Bank, prior to its acquisition by Macquarie in 2017.

So Northam is well-placed to give his views on how the renewable energy investment landscape has changed since the UK GIB was willed into existence a little over 13 years ago.

“There is more friction in the delivery model now, whether that’s a supply chain constraint, or shifts in the cost of capital, or permitting and regulation, or geopolitical [risks],” he says. “And this isn’t technical complexity. It’s that all the enabling requirements are more complex, together with the fact that value recognition [of assets] is happening later.”

The latter point is something that many project sponsors have had to adjust to, as buyers of assets or portfolios of assets would rather see that permitting is in place and construction is underway, or even that an asset is operating, for it to be investable. Pipelines and so-called ‘bragawatts’ are not as easy a sell as they used to be.

“I actually think it’s a good thing for market participants like us, because it creates a competitive advantage for large-scale, well-capitalised participants who have both the expertise and the capital capacity to stay on that journey longer,” Northam says.

Longer horizons

Capital needs to have a longer-term horizon, Northam says – not a new concept for infrastructure investors, of course, but something worth remembering as the nature of the global power market continues to change.

“You need that deep experience and expertise just to navigate the complexity – and you also need scale,” he says. “Scale is the critical driver for how you win in this space.”

Being part of one of the world’s largest infrastructure asset managers, perhaps you would expect Northam to say that scale is vital. But he argues that scale enables MAM GI to be “the most relevant market player” to a given supplier, ensuring that said supplier will help the firm meet its requirements “in a way that, frankly, a smaller-scale player would just have to stand in line and wait for equipment to be made available, on terms that will be dictated by the supplier”.

Another thing that has begun to shift in recent years is investor attitudes towards all things green and ESG related. What was once a hot buzzword has lost something of its appeal for many – although by no means all – institutional investors.

“Some investors have a particular agenda around transition, but many of them don’t and they’re just investing on the pure economics of the global opportunity set,” Northam says.

The firm has received longstanding support from European investors, with the continent’s institutions being historically much more supportive of sustainable investment initiatives than those in other jurisdictions.

Northam says Australian LPs have also been backing some of MAM GI’s strategies in a “really material way”, while Asian LPs’ increased focus on yielding infrastructure investments has prompted the firm to focus on asset development in order to capture more value and follow opportunities through to operations.

The pool of capital that has been most widely discussed in sustainable finance circles in recent years, though, has been from the US, where President Donald Trump’s administration has waged war on off shore wind and rolled back other environmental regulations.

Northam says it is a “mixed bag” and acknowledges that debate in the US has become polarised over this issue. “The interesting part is that it means we’re getting more traction, I think, with some investors [there] because they’re saying, ‘Actually, I don’t like this story. I don’t like what’s going on here, so I’m going to lean [into ESG] even more heavily.’

“But undoubtedly there are parts of the US market, from a client perspective, where there is just no amount of stepping them through the economics on why [an investment is] compelling that will change their mindset. It’s an interesting dynamic.”