An investment fund focused on smart city infrastructure and seeded by a major Dutch pension fund has completed the purchase of two leading Italian street lighting companies.
The Smart City Infrastructure Fund (SCIF) has purchased Ottima, which works in partnership with small to medium sized municipalities to design, install, retrofit and finance smart streetlighting projects.
Services also include public wifi, smart traffic lights, CCTV monitoring, electric vehicle charging stations, solar panels and smart building technology.
Shortly after announcing the Ottima deal, the SCIF acquired another Italian streetlighting company, Selettra, creating a portfolio of A$290 million of streetlighting assets in Italy.
The Italian acquisitions are the fund’s first in Europe, and have been executed through SCIF investment partner PATRIZIA’s infrastructure business.
The SCIF was seeded by A$850 billion Dutch pension fund APG with a A$400 million allocation at the beginning of 2019 to facilitate the development of smart city infrastructure across Australia, Europe, North America.
Australian asset management company Whitehelm Capital created the fund as a platform for institutional investors to pool their funds and find smart city opportunities around the world. The fund had its second close in September 2021, having raised a total of A$1.2 billion.
Other SCIF investments have focused on the US, where it has partnered with SiFi Networks to fund a program of over A$700 million of “Smart City ready” digital infrastructure across mid-size cities.
SiFi is creating a high quality fibre optic network to be installed underground via micro trenching.
The network will consist of around 600 kilometres of fibre and will pass by more than 30,000 homes and 4500 businesses. It will be open to Internet Service Providers on an open access basis to deliver retail and business services.
The SCIF investment plan is to focus on energy and resources efficiency, networks and grids, mobility and data analytics which serve security and social infrastructure.
The fund’s goal is to provide long term institutional capital to develop “sustainable urban ecosystems.”
The fund helps cities deal with continued urbanisation, climate change and resource scarcity, the development of sustainable communities, technological advancement and digitalisation.
“The ultimate objective of the fund is to improve quality of life and meet the needs of cities, allowing city officials to interact directly with the community, to improve physical infrastructure and how essential services are delivered,” APG’s head of infrastructure for Europe, Ron Boots, said when the fund made its first allocation.
Whitehelm Capital and APG put the global funding requirement for such projects at A$2.3 trillion by 2025, but say that they often struggle to gain the attention of institutional finance.
Although based in Sydney, Whitehelm made a name for itself in energy and infrastructure investment globally, investing in Britain’s Green Investment Bank alongside Macquarie Group.
